NASA will launch its most ambitious Jupiter mission to date next week as the Europa Clipper is on schedule to depart from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
On Oct. 10, the exploratory mission will travel atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to begin its five-and-a-half year journey to Europa — Jupiter's fourth largest and arguably most scientifically important satellites. Europa has long been a desired mission for NASA based on its atmospheric conditions and massive liquid oceans that hold twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans combined.
NASA scientists have detected evidence of life sustaining materials such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. These essential buildings blocks nestled beneath a subsurface ocean could harbor just the right conditions for organic life.
The $5.2 billion spacecraft carries a payload which includes cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images and composition maps of the moon's surface and atmosphere. Ice-penetrating radar will be used to search for subsurface water and thermal instruments to detect locations of warmer ice and potential recent eruptions of water.
The Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission with a height of 16 feet and a length of more than 100 feet when its solar arrays are fully deployed.
The moon was first suspected of having water when the Galileo spacecraft discovered the venting of thin plumes of water miles into space in 1995. The smooth surface of Europa also suggests the outer ice layer is being continuously remade by interior processes.
The upcoming launch of the Europa Clipper is a much welcome reprieve after a summer of frustration following the inability of the Boeing Starliner to return American astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. They are now scheduled to return to Earth early in 2025 on SpaceX's Dragon capsule.
Europa Clipper is scheduled to rendezvous with Jupiter in April 2030 and conduct 49 close flybys of the moon.