Small Satellites aim to reveal details about Jupiter's icy moon.

Small satellites could reveal big details about Jupiter's icy moon. The mission known as Europa is a proposal designed to map the entire world and possibly find signs of life too. The mission is designed to find amino acids in order to determine if there is a possibility of life. With CubeSats, people can do these assignments at a lower cost and higher efficiency. 

According to Astronomy.com, while NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been busy putting together flagship missions to the Europa system, a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts proposal seeks a way to do a cheap mission with the potential to map ice thickness and even search for the basic components of life. 

The proposal, a collaboration between Draper Laboratories and Cornell University, would utilize a combination of small satellites known as CubeSats and even smaller microprobes called ChipSats to explore Europa on the cheap. A probe of about 3 to 12 individual CubeSat units that are stacked together would orbit the icy moon of jupiter and create an effective map of the icy terrain of Europa,  measuring ice thickness and finding areas of low ice density to potentially access the ocean below. 

The simple instrumentation would allow for it to fly miles over the surface of the world and collect data in order to detect amino acids. They are looking for the amino acids in order to effectively find the chirality or the strong handedness of the surface in order to detect if these acids are present.