Space & Astronomy

NASA's Europa Clipper launches on mission to Jupiter's icy moon

By T.K. Randall
October 15, 2024 ·  41 comments

The spacecraft has now deployed its solar panels. Image Credit: NASA When it comes to finding places within our own solar system that are likely to be able to support primitive alien life today, there is perhaps no greater candidate than Jupiter's moon Europa.

Believed to be an icy shell covering a subsurface ocean of liquid water, this freezing moon could potentially be home to primitive organisms that thrive in its dark, icy depths.

Answers to some of the most important questions about Europa, such as whether there really is an ocean beneath its surface and if it has the potential to harbor life, have long remained tantalizingly elusive, but now for the first time, NASA has launched a spacecraft entirely dedicated to probing the Jovian moon's many mysteries.

Known as the Europa Clipper, this huge spacecraft launched successfully atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket yesterday and is now beginning its 5.5-year voyage to its destination.Due to the complexities of the mission, Europa Clipper will not enter permanent orbit around Europa but will instead perform a series of 44 flybys from an elliptical orbit around Jupiter.

Its main goals will be to definitively prove the existence of a subsurface ocean, as well as to study the exchange of ice and water between this ocean and Europa's surface.

It will also be studying the chemical makeup of the water and the geology of the moon's surface features.

The spacecraft has another goal, too - to scout out potential landing sites for a future mission that would see a spacecraft land on the surface of Europa and study its ice and water directly.

Suffice to say, what it finds there could be revolutionary.


Source: Space.com | Comments (41)

Tags: Europa, Jupiter