Though two years may seem like a short mission, considering it took Juno five to reach Jupiter, scientists are approaching the craft’s fate with caution. While Juno is heavily armed with radiation shielding to protect its systems against Jupiter’s radiation, its proximity to the gas giant means it won’t hold out for long. During this second half of the mission, the spacecraft will be exposed to 80 percent of the radiation its designer planned for, meaning they will have only a short window of time to accomplish their goals before losing control of Juno completely, Rebecca Boyle reports for Popular Mechanics.

“Stray electrons will collide with its computers, corrupting its memory. Each electron collision will produce a shower of secondary particles, which will also collide with Juno and create more showers of even smaller particles, and so on,” Boyle writes. “Eventually, this constant bombardment will cause memory failure, computer errors and potential hardware problems that could not only jeopardize scientific research, but also cause Juno to spiral out of control.”

By sending Juno on a death spiral into Jupiter’s atmosphere before they lose control, NASA’s scientists are safeguarding any chance that Juno could crash on Europa and infect it with Earth-born microbes, just as they did with the Galileo spacecraft in 2003. If life does exist in some form on Europa, taking this precaution is the best way to prevent inadvertent alteration of an alien world before NASA can safely explore it.

Read more at: smithsonianmag.com