Historic NASA mission to Jupiter moon blasts off

The uncrewed spacecraft is named Europa Clipper after the ships that crisscrossed Earth’s oceans hundreds of years ago. Following a 1.8 billion-mile journey, it is expected to settle into orbit around Jupiter in 2030, where it will spend four years helping scientists assess whether Europa has the conditions necessary to sustain life.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration considers the moon, which is slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, to be one of the most promising places to look for life in our solar system, given observations from previous missions that its icy crust likely floats on a subsurface ocean with more than twice the water of all of Earth’s oceans combined.

Europa was the first documented ocean world, a class of planets and moons with substantial liquid water, according to Curt Niebur, program scientist for the Europa Clipper mission. Other nearby moons—such as Jupiter’s Ganymede and Saturn’s Enceladus—are also considered ocean worlds, but Europa’s ocean is most similar to Earth’s, Niebur said.

The Europa Clipper craft will look to complete nearly 50 flybys of Europa, buzzing as close as 16 miles from the moon’s surface, as mission team members collect data needed to characterize its ocean, geology and composition.

Fully deployed, the 100-foot-long Europa Clipper, about as long as a basketball court, is the largest spacecraft ever built by NASA for a planetary mission. Among other instruments, the spacecraft’s science payload includes an ice-penetrating radar, a magnetometer that can measure magnetic fields generated by Europa and cameras that can produce images and maps of the moon’s surface.

Margaret Kivelson, team leader of the mission’s magnetometer, said the instrument can help reveal how deeply Europa’s ocean is buried under the ice and how deep the ocean itself is using the same process employed by metal detector machines used in airports.

The launch, first scheduled for Oct. 10, was delayed due to Hurricane Milton, which devastated parts of Florida. The 95-year-old Kivelson, whose work studying Jupiter’s environs spans more than four decades, had planned to watch on sight with her family, but as Milton approached, she delayed and eventually canceled her travels.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket finally ferried the Europa Clipper spacecraft into the cosmos just after noon Eastern Time on Monday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

“The disappointment of not being able to be there and watch my baby go off into space, it’s very upsetting," Kivelson said.

Once the spacecraft’s solar arrays—which will help it collect sunlight for its power needs when orbiting Jupiter—deploy, Niebur said he will breathe much easier. That operation will be completed in the immediate hours following launch. For him, a successful launch represents the start of an endeavor that could completely change how scientists think about the rarity of worlds that can sustain life.

“If Europa Clipper can show that in our one solar system there are two habitable worlds—Earth and Europa—that has profound implications for how common habitable worlds are in the galaxy," he said.