NASA has launched another deep space mission — this one to explore an icy moon of Jupiter and study whether it could potentially be habitable. The Europa Clipper mission launched using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy at 12:06 p.m. ET today, Monday October 14, from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, setting off on its long journey to the Jovian system.
“Liftoff, @EuropaClipper!” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote on X. “Today, we embark on a new journey across the solar system in search of the ingredients for life within Jupiter’s icy moon. Our next chapter in space exploration has begun.”
The mission aims to explore the moon of Europa, which is particularly interesting to astrobiology researchers as it has a liquid water ocean. This ocean isn’t on the moon’s surface, however — as it is so far from the sun, the ocean is hidden beneath a icy shell of around 10 to 15 miles in thickness. Missions like Galileo have orbited Europa and taken readings from it, but this effort ended in 2003. Since then, the moon has only been explored in flybys. Now, the moon will get its own dedicated mission, set to begin when Clipper arrives there in 2030.
Europa Clipper will study the moon’s ice shell to determine exactly how thick it is, and will also look beneath this shell into the ocean below to see whether it hosts materials called organic compounds — the building blocks of life. While the mission is not expecting to find evidence of life there, scientists want to know it the required elements for life to form are present, as that will help them learn about what locations in our solar system and beyond could potentially host life.
“It’s important to us to paint a picture of what that alien ocean is like — the kind of chemistry or even biochemistry that could be happening there,” said Morgan Cable of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a statement.
Other icy moons like Enceladus are known to give off epic plumes of water vapor from their surface, in which material from the oceans below bursts through the ice and is thrown up into the air above the moon. It’s not known if Europa also has these plumes, but to study this alien environment from orbit, Clipper will fly close to the surface and take tiny samples of material being ejected.
“The spacecraft will study gas and grains coming off Europa by sticking out its tongue and tasting those grains, breathing in those gases,” said Cable.
For now, the mission has made contact with ground control and is safely on its way to Jupiter on a 1.8-billion mile journey. It will use the gravity of other planets to give it a boost on its way, making flybys of Mars and Earth before performing a slingshot maneuver onward to its destination.