Europa Clipper lifting off at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Image: SpaceX
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter aims to answer a fundamental question that propels space exploration: are we alone in the universe?
NASA’s Europa Clipper has embarked on a 2.9bn km journey to investigate Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has an enormous subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life.
The spacecraft, which is the largest NASA has ever built for a planetary mission, launched yesterday (14 October) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, propelled by a SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket.
About an hour after launch, the spacecraft separated from the Falcon rocket. Soon after, ground controllers confirmed two-way communication with the craft. Mission controllers later confirmed that the two solar arrays flanking the main body of the spacecraft have fully unfolded, meaning that it now has a reliable source of power for the rest of its journey to Jupiter.
An artist’s illustration of the Europa Clipper with solar arrays fully deployed as it orbits Jupiter. Image: NASA
The spacecraft will make use of gravity during its long journey. In four months, it will fly by Mars for a gravity assist and then past Earth for another gravity assist in 2026. It is due to arrive at Jupiter in April 2030, and then fly by Europa 49 times, getting as close as 25km from the surface in 2031.
Jupiter has at least 92 moons that are made up of hugely diverse materials. The Galileo mission between 1995 and 2003 studied the massive planet and its mysterious moons and showed strong evidence that under Europa’s ice lies an enormous, salty ocean with more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
The goal of the mission is to determine whether Europa, which is about the size of Earth’s moon, has the conditions to support life. With a host of scientific instruments, including ice-penetrating radar, cameras and a thermal instrument, scientists hope to gather data to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to analyse its composition and to characterise its geology.
“We’re ecstatic to send Europa Clipper on its way to explore a potentially habitable ocean world,” said Dr Laurie Leshin, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“Europa Clipper will undoubtedly deliver mind-blowing science. While always bittersweet to send something we’ve laboured over for years off on its long journey, we know this remarkable team and spacecraft will expand our knowledge of our solar system and inspire future exploration.”
More than 4,000 people have contributed to the Clipper mission since it was approved in 2015.
NASA project manager Jordan Evans said that during the launch he’d be thinking about the hours of dedication and innovation that went into the mission.
“This launch isn’t just the next chapter in our exploration of the solar system,” Evans said, “it’s a leap toward uncovering the mysteries of another ocean world, driven by our shared curiosity and continued search to answer the question, ‘are we alone?’”
In April last year, the European Space Agency launched the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission to conduct detailed observations of Jupiter and its moons.
This summer, the Juice spacecraft undertook the first of four gravity assist manoeuvres to get on the right path to arrive at Jupiter with the correct speed and direction in July 2031.
This first-ever lunar-Earth flyby went off “without a hitch”, with the Juice mission now heading for a flyby of Venus in 2025.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
