Duncan Young at the South Pole as part of the NSF COLDEX project to search for the oldest ice in Antarctica, where he used an aircraft outfitted with instruments, including radar, very similar to what is to be used on the Europa Clipper.
Duncan Young at the South Pole as part of the NSF COLDEX project to search for the oldest ice in Antarctica, where he used an aircraft outfitted with instruments, including radar, very similar to what is to be used on the Europa Clipper.
A Taranaki man fascinated with space exploration is fulfilling a childhood dream, as part of the Europa Clipper mission, which launched a space probe on 14 October, to investigate whether Jupiter’s icy moon has the conditions for life to exist.
Duncan Young was always drawn to astronomy and science fiction, and as a 9-year-old attending Ratapiko Primary School, he was the youngest member of the Taranaki Active Astronomy Group.
His favourite book at the time? The Arthur C Clarke novel 2010: Odyssey Two - the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey - where the search for life under the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa was central to the plot.
Fast forward four decades and Young is working on the NASA mission examining whether the conditions for life exist on that very same moon.
Now an associate research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Young is a member of the instrument science team for REASON, an ice-penetrating radar, which will fire energy at Europa’s icy crust from the Clipper probe.
The team will then help interpret the data that returns, to understand if Europa is habitable and understand the geographical landscape beneath the ice.
An artist's concept of a plume of water vapour on the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, located about 800 million kilometres from the sun. Photo: NASA/ ESA - K Retherford/ SWRI
Now 49, the geologist said his early years growing up on an east Taranaki farm were formative.
“I was always fascinated by astronomy and science fiction, so those kind of things went together with the space missions in the 1980s. The Voyager space probe was flying past various planets while I was a young kid and then I managed to hook up with the New Plymouth Astronomy Society and then the Taranaki Active Astronomy Group.
“They were astronomers who met ... every month. Most of them were in their 40s, and I was this 9-year-old whose mum would bring him along to the meetings, and I would look through telescopes and make subscriptions to Astronomy Magazine, the big US hobbyist magazine for astronomy.
“Yeah, and I was voraciously reading science fiction.”
After leaving Inglewood High School, Young - still fascinated by space - enrolled at the University of Canterbury.
“I went to Canterbury primarily because I knew they had a great astronomy programme, and they’ve got the Mt John Observatory next to Lake Tekapo. And so I went there to basically become an astronomer. And then I learned astronomy has a lot of math,” Young said.
“And then there was geology, which Canterbury was also known for, which has rocks and field trips. So I ended up going into the geology path. I felt more comfortable with that.”
New Zealand scientist Duncan Young with a model of the Europa Clipper spacecraft in early 2022, pointing to a REASON radar antenna
In his final year at Canterbury, Young had a lightbulb moment.
“I realised that you could actually combine the two disciplines, with planetary geology. And there were actually New Zealanders who had made contributions there.
“One of the professors at Canterbury, he had helped train the Apollo 14 astronauts on their geological expeditions on the moon. And then there is Brian Mason, who was a famous astronomer who studied meteorites.
Jupiter's moon Europa: NASA says Jupiter has a complex system of rings, asteroids and moons, including an estimated 80 to 95 moons. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
Young then applied for graduate school in the United States and landed a scholarship to study at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he did his post doctoral programme on the geology of Venus.
Young said he was lucky to be in America when it was coming out of a long lull in space exploration.
“In the late 1990s when I was doing my PhD programme, we suddenly had new missions going to Mars. We had [NASA’s] Galileo [spacecraft] doing its work at Jupiter. And then eventually would have the Cassini mission that would be put together and launched for the planet Saturn, where it found many fabulous things.”
Galileo confirmed that Europa was a fascinating target.
“Using the magnetometer on Galileo, they were able to detect that there was a briny layer inside Europa - so definite sign of an ocean. An ocean that might actually be twice the size of Earth’s ocean.”
But soon after graduating, Young was out of work and back in Aotearoa, before he was selected for a project very much based on Earth.
“My visa had expired. I’m back in New Zealand. I know a lot about radar and know a lot about planets and mapping and tools associated with that, and I get picked up sight unseen by the University of Texas Geophysics Group and sent to Antarctica for 4 1/2 months.”
There, Young helped survey Thwaites Glacier, one of the largest glaciers on Earth, with a prototype of the ice-penetrating radar that would be key to his involvement in the Europa Clipper mission.
That led to a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, processing the data from the Thwaites Glacier project
“We were able to take that data and use it to expand our knowledge of Thwaites glacier, but it also allowed us to build a template for what we might see at Europa, if we took a similar radar technology.”
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket with the Europa Clipper spacecraft aboard launching from Florida's Cape Canaveral on 14 October. Photo/ AFP - Chandan Khanna
Young said the Europa Clipper craft was built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was a NASA operation run by the California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, but the University of Texas was in charge of how the radar was used.
“So there’s that radar, and then there’s eight other instruments on Europa that will look at different aspects of the Europa problem.
“We have got cameras on board, we have imaging spectrometer which looks at the composition of the surface. We’ve got mass spectrometer that sniffs the particles around Europa.
“We have a magnetometer to follow up on those observations of the ocean underneath the ice shelf and we’re able to use the spacecraft itself as a way to look at the gravity field of Europa to tell us more about the mass distribution.”
Young said Europa Clipper was the largest planetary probe that NASA had ever launched and its solar panel was about the the size of a netball court.
“And then our radar antennas sit on the edge of the solar array”, he said. Some of the antenna were 16m long.
“So we’ve got two frequencies: one is VHF, which is kind of like television frequencies; and then we have a high frequency channel, which is at much lower frequencies - and these are complementary.
“And basically, we shoot out a pulse of radar energy and that goes down into the cold ice, and ice is very transparent as it turns out, to radar waves at these frequencies. And that goes down and then reflects off anything it can see in the subsurface.
“The big thing that radar reflects off quite strongly is water. So if there’s water in the subsurface of the ice shelf, you should be able to see it.”
He said they expect to learn something valuable about the potential habitability of Europa.
“Although one thing we’re very careful to say is that Europa Clipper is not a life detection mission, that can be very tough, and it gets philosophical as to what exactly is life.
“But we can see if the energy gradient is in the right place, the chemicals are in the right place, and if the structure of the planet [is] in the right place that could allow for life. And then if it looks promising, we can send a follow up mission to prove the case.”
While other scientists on the project will have to wait until Europa Clipper arrives at Jupiter in 2030 for the first of its 49 flybys of the moon to get to work, Young and his team will be busy testing the radar in the interim.
That includes getting test measurements from the surface of Mars and doing a scan of the Milky Way Galaxy by rotating the spacecraft around, and having the spacecraft beam radar waves back at Earth.
Young said although he felt very fortunate and privileged to be involved in the Europa Clipper mission, his involvement in space exploration always felt possible, despite his upbringing in rural Taranaki.
“I had encountered enough people who’d done remarkable things. Just the astronomers in New Zealand, one of the leaders of the Active Astronomy Group in Taranaki, was Rod Austin, he’d found three comets. I mean, one of those comets ended up being the first comet that the Hubble Space Telescope systematically looked at.
“So it seemed tangible. It seemed something that with a little bit of persistence, you could be involved in. I mean, I dreamed of it all the time, so yeah, dreaming about it was easy, but the path had few disconnects I would not have expected.”
One of the unexpected tangents was the chance to visit Antarctica and work on the data from that project, “which I’m still doing”, he said.
“Earlier this year I was at the South Pole, working at the US South Pole station in using an eight-year-old DC3 equipped with a very similar radar to the one on Europa Clipper, looking for the oldest ice in Antarctica.”
Young had a simple message for any young New Zealanders dreaming of working in space exploration:
“It’s very possible. When I left New Zealand it was instant coffee and there was no way space would be a thing in New Zealand. Now Rocket Lab is launching regularly from the Māhia Peninsula and you can get really good coffee in New Zealand.
“Remain true to your vision and your interests, whether it be space or be it anything.”
