NASA has sent into space its Europa Clipper spacecraft for an anticipated seven-year journey seeking to probe life-sustainment signs on Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa.
The spacecraft lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket Monday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA said.
The voyage of Europa Clipper, the agency’s largest spacecraft built for a mission to another planet, is expected to cover 1.8 billion miles. It will travel on a trajectory that will tap gravity assists from a Mars flyby in four months and then another flyby assist back to Earth in 2026. The spacecraft is anticipated to start orbiting Jupiter in April 2030 to set 49 flybys over Europa.
Europa Clipper’s science experiments on the moon flybys, programmed to as close as 16 miles to the surface, is scheduled to start in 2031. The spacecraft carries nine science instruments, with cameras and ice-penetrating radar among them. The science instruments will operate in concert to investigate Europa’s icy surface, deep interior and thin atmosphere.
NASA deployed in the spacecraft its largest solar arrays ever used in an interplanetary mission to power Europa Clipper’s instruments.
Maxar Technologies’ SSL unit, one of the companies that secured a NASA contract for the Europa Clipper instrumentation, was tasked to provide a remote engineering unit providing an interface between the spacecraft’s flight computer, thermal sensors and attitude control systems.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a 2024 Wash100 Award winner, congratulated the Europa Clipper team on the launch that he described as the start of “the first journey to an ocean world beyond Earth.” He added, “By exploring the unknown, Europa Clipper will help us better understand whether there is the potential for life not just within our solar system, but among the billions of moons and planets beyond our sun.”