As Pluto fades in its rearview mirror, NASA is preparing an ambitious mission to a distant and mysterious oceanic world — and a small business in Boulder is working with University of Colorado scientists to make it possible.

Some 390 million miles from Earth is a tantalizing, forbidding orb: Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is thought to have an ocean of liquid water beneath a crust of jagged ice perhaps 40 miles thick.

“Anywhere we see water on Earth, we see life,” said Barry Goldstein, the project manager for the planned Europa mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Europa, from many astrobiologists’ point of view, is the next best place after Earth to find life in our solar system.”

NASA is moving ahead with a mission to send a probe to do multiple flybys of Europa. The instruments for the mission have already been selected, including one from CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP.

But the challenges of the mission are daunting. Even after journeying through the cosmic radiation of space to reach Europa, the spacecraft would be additionally bombarded by Jupiter’s intense radiation fields, which are powerful enough to damage instruments or destroy a spacecraft.

That’s where Boulder’s Tech-X Corp. comes in.

Tech-X, a 35-person private software engineering firm, was enlisted to make sure LASP’s instrument — the Surface Dust Mass Analyzer, or SUDA — will survive Europa’s punishing radiation.

“We love the idea of being part of new scientific discoveries,” Tech-X CEO John Cary said. “If we make an impact and help enable this scientific discovery … I’ll be extremely proud.”

The Tech-X team will run computer simulations and other tests to ensure that the radiation around Europa does not disturb SUDA’s function. The simulations calculate the level of radiation and what effect it would have on the SUDA.

Despite the high-stakes nature of the mission, Sveta Shasharina, the principal investigator on the project for Tech-X, is keeping things straightforward.

“For me, personally, I would like to make sure that it has the time to collect the data it wants to collect,” she said. “Many interesting things can be found there.”

SUDA will sample and analyze dust particles from Europa’s surface. The presence of certain chemicals, minerals or compounds will help scientists determine the composition of the planet’s icy crust and ocean.

“What we can do is tell the astrobiologists if the building blocks for life are available,” said CU physics professor Sascha Kempf, whose team developed the instrument.

Those building blocks will tell scientists if Europa is potentially habitable and, if the evidence suggests as much, whether the far more expensive and complicated endeavor of landing on Europa can be planned, said Curt Niebur, the NASA program scientist on the mission. Niebur also works on NASA’s New Horizons mission, which last month successfully reached Pluto and then continued on to the Kuiper Belt.

“I think that there is a high probability that Europa is habitable,” Niebur said. “We have to figure out how habitable.”

Habitability indicates the possibility of life, not its existence. If Europa is actually home to life forms, the implications would be profound. If life formed on two unique bodies in the very same solar system, that would indicate that life is overwhelmingly prevalent in the universe.

The Europa mission — slated to cost $2 billion, not including the launch vehicle — would launch in May 2022 at the earliest. The required congressional budget support for the mission has thus far been enthusiastic, but that could change.

The journey to Europa could take 2½ to 7½ years, depending on the launch vehicle and time of launch.

The possibilities of what could be found beneath the icy crust gives the dark and distant world a special allure for scientists and science fiction fans alike.

“Of course, I don’t believe they’ll find anything like octopus there,” joked Shasharina, who is a sci-fi fan.

Matthew Nussbaum: 303-954-1666, mnussbaum @denverpost.com or twitter.com/ MatthewNussbaum