NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft launches to find out if life could exist on an icy ocean world

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A mission to explore one of the solar system's most promising environments that could be suitable for life has launched.

NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft, designed to explore its namesake, Jupiter's moon Europa, lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:06 p.m. ET on Monday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The event was broadcast live on NASA's website.

The long-awaited launch, originally scheduled for October 10, was delayed by Hurricane Milton. But crews on site at the center checked launch facilities after the storm and gave the spacecraft permission to return to the launch pad.

Europa Clipper will serve as NASA's first spacecraft to explore an ice-covered ocean world in our solar system and aim to find out whether the moon might be habitable for life as we know it.

Clipper will carry nine instruments and a gravity experiment to study the ocean beneath Europa's thick ice shell. It is estimated that the Moon's ocean contains twice as much liquid water as Earth's oceans.

“The instruments work hand in hand to answer our most pressing questions about Europa,” Robert Pappalardo, mission project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “We will learn what makes Europa tick, from its core and rocky interior, to its ocean and ice shell, to its very thin atmosphere and surrounding space environment.”

The spacecraft also carries more than 2.6 million names submitted by people around the world, as well as a poem by U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón.

The $5.2 billion mission began as a concept in 2013, but the path to launch was not without challenges.

In May, engineers discovered that components of the spacecraft may not be able to withstand Jupiter's harsh radiation environment. However, the team was able to complete the required tests on time and received approval for launch in September. This prevented a 13-month launch delay without any changes to the mission plan, objectives or trajectory.

“There has never been a more difficult year than this to get Europa Clipper across the finish line,” said Curt Niebur, Europa Clipper program scientist.

“But despite all that, we never doubted that it would be worth it,” said Niebur. “It's a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today – a chance to make the first exploration of this new kind of world that we Very recently, an ocean world was announced that is completely submerged and covered in an ocean of liquid water that is completely unlike anything we have seen before. That’s what awaits us in Europe.”

After launch, the spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) and is expected to arrive at Jupiter in April 2030. Along the way, the spacecraft will conduct flybys of Mars and then Earth, using each planet's gravity to help spacecraft use less fuel and gain speed on their journey to Jupiter.

Europa Clipper will work with Juice, or the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, a spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency in April 2023 and arriving in July 2031 to study Jupiter and its largest moons.

Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission. Thanks to its solar panels, it is 100 feet (30.5 meters) wide – longer than a basketball court. The massive panels will help soak up enough sunlight to power the spacecraft's instruments and electronics during its exploration of Europa, which is five times farther from the sun than Earth.

Once it arrives, the spacecraft will spend its mission conducting 49 flybys of Europa instead of landing on the lunar surface.

Mission teams initially feared that Clipper would not be able to withstand Jupiter's harsh environment because the giant planet's magnetic field – which traps and accelerates charged particles and produces spacecraft-damaging radiation – is 20,000 times stronger than Earth's. But engineers have found a way around this problem.

Each flyby of Europa, expected every two to three weeks, will result in the spacecraft being exposed to Jupiter's harmful radiation for less than a day before it departs again. The time between flybys can help the spacecraft's transistors, which help control the craft's power flow, recover from radiation exposure.

Meanwhile, a specially designed safe made of titanium and aluminum protects the spacecraft's sensitive electronics from radiation.

Ultimately, the flybys will take Clipper to within 16 miles (25 kilometers) of the surface, flying over a different location in Europe each time. This strategy will allow the spacecraft to map nearly the entire moon.

And once the mission is complete, the spacecraft's journey could end with a crash onto the surface of Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, although this is not yet clear.

Europa Clipper is not designed to look for evidence of life on Europa, but rather to use a range of instruments to find out whether life might be possible in an ocean on another planet in our solar system.

Astronomers believe the ingredients for life, including water, energy and the right chemistry, may already be present on Europa. The spacecraft could collect evidence to find out whether these ingredients coexist in a way that makes the moon's environment potentially habitable.

The mission will study the precise thickness of the ice shell that envelops the moon and how that frozen exterior interacts with the ocean below. It will also characterize the moon's geology. Scientists are interested in learning the exact composition of the ocean and what causes the previously observed clouds to rise through cracks in the ice and allow particles to escape into space. They also want to determine whether material from Europa's surface is seeping into the ocean.

To conduct a thorough investigation, Europa Clipper is equipped with cameras and spectrometers to capture high-resolution images and create maps of the lunar surface and thin atmosphere. The spacecraft also has a thermal instrument to detect places with cloud activity and warmer ice. A magnetometer will study the Moon's magnetic field and confirm the existence of the European Ocean, as well as its depth and salinity.

Ice-penetrating radars will peer beneath the outer shell, estimated to be 15 to 25 kilometers thick, to look for signs of the moon's ocean.

And if there are active plumes ejecting particles from Europa's ocean into space, the spacecraft's mass spectrometer and dust analyzer can “sniff” the particles and analyze their composition, said Haje Korth, Europa Clipper deputy project scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics laboratory.

“The data from the mass spectrometer and dust detector will show whether Europe has the composition and chemistry required for life to emerge,” Korth said.

All instruments will be turned on and operational during each flyby to collect as much data as possible.

The Europa Clipper team is often asked about their hopes for what the spacecraft will discover on Europa and how this could pave the way for future exploration in search of life beyond our planet.

“For me, it would be to find some kind of oasis, if you will, on Europa where there is evidence of liquid water not far below the surface and evidence of organic matter on the surface,” Pappalardo said. “Maybe it would be warm, maybe it would be the source of a cloud. This could be a place where NASA could perhaps send a lander in the future to dig beneath the surface and literally look for signs of life.”