Last week, NASA announced the scientific instruments that will be put on board a spacecraft bound for Jupiter’s moon Europa in the next decade. This is a solid mission that will map the moon in incredible detail, including making 3-D maps of the ice shell surrounding its undersurface ocean.
I’m pretty excited about this, which is why it’s the topic of this week’s Bad Astronomy Video:
I wrote about this briefly last week, and the discussion took a turn for the unexpected when I got a sharp reminder of the bizarre nature of sexism online. We can travel billions of kilometers and explore strange, new worlds, but we still have a long way to go to make ours better as well. I like to think we are smart enough and good enough to do both at the same time.
