Spaceship takes off to search for alien life on a distant moon

A space probe designed to search for signs of alien life on one of Jupiter's icy moons has launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

NASA launched the spacecraft at 12:06 p.m. local time (4:06 p.m. GMT) after Hurricane Milton forced the mission to postpone its plans last week.

Europa Clipper will now travel 1.8 billion miles to reach Europa, a deeply mysterious moon orbiting Jupiter.

While it won't arrive until 2030, what it finds could change what we know about life in our solar system.

A vast ocean containing twice the amount of water as Earth could be trapped beneath the moon's surface.

The spacecraft is pursuing a European mission that launched last year, but will use a cosmic piggyback to overtake and arrive first.

After years of preparation, the Europa Clipper's launch was postponed at the last minute after Hurricane Milton devastated Florida this week.

The spacecraft was rushed inside to seek shelter, but after checking the launch pad at Cape Canaveral for damage, engineers now gave the green light for liftoff at 12:06 p.m. local time (16:06 GMT).

“If we discover life so far from the sun, it would mean that life had a different origin than Earth,” says Mark Fox-Powell, a planetary microbiologist at the Open University.

“This is hugely important because if this happens twice in our solar system, it could mean that life is really widespread,” he says.

Europa is 628 million kilometers from Earth and is just a little bigger than our moon, but that's where the similarity ends.

If it were in our sky, it would shine five times brighter because the water ice would reflect much more sunlight.

Its icy crust is up to 25 km thick and beneath it could be a vast saltwater ocean. There may also be chemicals that are the ingredients for a simple life.

Scientists first realized that Europa could harbor life in the 1970s when they saw water ice through a telescope in Arizona.

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft took the first close-up images, and in 1995, NASA's Galileo spacecraft flew past Europa and captured some deeply enigmatic images. They showed a surface full of dark, reddish-brown cracks, fractures that could contain salts and sulfur compounds that could support life.

The Hubble Space Telescope has since captured images of what may be plumes of water being ejected 100 miles (160 kilometers) above the lunar surface

But none of these missions came close to Europe long enough to truly understand it.

Now scientists hope that the instruments on NASA's Clipper spacecraft can map almost the entire moon, collecting dust particles and flying through the water plumes.

Britney Schmidt, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University in the US, helped develop an onboard laser that can see through the ice.

“I’m most looking forward to understanding Europe’s sanitation. Where is the water? “Europe has the ice version of Earth’s subduction zones, magma chambers and tectonics – we will try to look into these regions and map them,” she says.

Their instrument, called Reason, was tested in Antarctica.

But unlike on Earth, all instruments on Clipper will be exposed to huge amounts of radiation, which Prof. Schmidt says is a “big problem.”

The spacecraft is expected to fly past Europa about 50 times, each time being irradiated with radiation equivalent to one million X-rays.

“A large part of the electronics is located in a safe that is heavily shielded to keep out radiation,” explains Prof. Schmidt.

The spacecraft is the largest ever built to visit a planet, and it has a long journey ahead of it. On a journey of 1.8 billion miles, it will orbit both Earth and Mars, moving further toward Jupiter through the so-called slingshot effect.

It can't carry enough fuel to move all the way on its own, so it will use the momentum of the gravitational pull of Earth and Mars.

It will overtake JUICE, the European Space Agency spacecraft that will also visit Europe on its way to another Jupiter moon called Ganeymede.

Once Clipper approaches Europe in 2030, it will turn its engines back on to carefully maneuver itself into the correct orbit.

Space explorers are very cautious when talking about the chances of discovering life – there is no expectation that they will find human-like creatures or animals.

“We're looking for the potential for habitability and for that we need four things: liquid water, a heat source and organic material. “After all, these three ingredients have to be stable for a long enough period of time for something to happen,” explains Michelle Dougherty, professor of space physics at Imperial College London.

And they hope that by better understanding the ice surface, they will know where to land a ship for a future mission.

An international team of scientists from NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab will monitor the odyssey.

At a time when a space launch takes place virtually every week, this mission promises something different, says Professor Fox-Powell.

“No profit is made. This is about exploration and curiosity and pushing the boundaries of what we know about our place in the universe,” he says.