NASA launched a spacecraft from Florida on Monday to investigate whether Jupiter’s moon Europa has suitable conditions to support life, with a focus on the large subsurface ocean that is believed to be filled with ice. It is hidden under a thick outer shell.
The US space agency’s Europa Clipper spacecraft blasted off on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral under sunny skies. The robotic solar-powered probe is scheduled to enter Jupiter’s orbit in 2030 after traveling about 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion km) over 5-1/2 years. The launch was planned last week but was postponed due to Hurricane Milton.
It is the largest spacecraft built by NASA for a planetary mission, measuring approximately 100 feet (30.5 m) long and approximately 58 feet (17.6 m) wide, with its antennas and solar arrays fully deployed – the size of a basketball. Larger than a court – while it weighs about 13,000 pounds. pounds (6,000 kg).
Even though Europa, the fourth largest of Jupiter’s 95 officially recognized moons, is only a quarter of Earth’s diameter, its vast global ocean of salty liquid water may contain twice as much water as Earth’s oceans. It is believed that Earth’s oceans are the birthplace of life on our planet.
Europa, whose diameter of about 1,940 miles (3,100 km) is about 90% the diameter of our moon, has been touted as a potential habitat for life beyond Earth in our solar system. Its icy shell is thought to be 10–15 miles (15–25 km) thick, lying over an ocean 40–100 miles (60–150 km) deep.
NASA Associate Administrator Jim Frey said at a prelaunch briefing on Sunday that Europa is one of the most promising environments for potentially habitable environments in our solar system, beyond Earth, though he added that the mission will not be able to detect any actual living organisms. There will be no search.
“What we discover on Europa will have profound implications for the study of astrobiology and how we view our place in the universe,” Frey said.
“Scientists believe that beneath Europa’s icy surface there are conditions suitable for life. Its conditions are water, energy, chemistry and stability,” said Sandra Conley, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Mission objectives include measuring the interior ocean and the layer of ice above it, mapping the composition of the moon’s surface, and looking for plumes of water vapor rising from Europa’s icy crust. Launching in 2031, Europa Clipper plans to conduct 49 close flybys of Europa over three years, getting as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers) to the moon’s surface.
Europa Clipper will operate in the intense radiation environment around Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
Jupiter is surrounded by a magnetic field about 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s. This magnetic field rotates, capturing and accelerating charged particles and producing radiation that can damage spacecraft. NASA built a safe made of titanium and aluminum inside Europa Clipper to protect its sensitive electronics from this radiation.
“One of the main challenges of the Europa Clipper mission is to make the spacecraft robust enough to withstand the radiation from Jupiter, but also sensitive enough to make the measurements needed to investigate Europa’s environment,” Conley said. “
NASA said Europa Clipper is loaded with more than 6,060 pounds (2,750 kilograms) of propellant to take it to Jupiter. For launch, the spacecraft was placed inside the protective nose cone on top of the rocket.
The spacecraft will not take a direct path to Jupiter. Instead, it occurs by flying by Mars and then returning to Earth, each using the planet’s gravity to increase its speed like a slingshot. Its massive solar arrays, which were folded for launch, will collect sunlight to power the spacecraft’s nine scientific instruments as well as its electronics and other subsystems.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)