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Europa Clipper launches from Florida on a SpaceX rocket to Jupiter's moon

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Europa Clipper launches from Florida on a SpaceX rocket to Jupiter's moon

“Our next chapter in space exploration has begun,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said after the launch.

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  • The Europa Clipper lifted off at 12:06 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center.
  • The Clipper faces a six-year, 1.8 billion-mile journey to Jupiter's moon Europa to search for evidence that the world might be habitable.
  • Europa is an icy celestial body that scientists have long suspected may provide the conditions necessary for life beneath its surface.

A NASA mission to explore a moon of Jupiter, considered one of our galaxy's most promising places for finding life-sustaining conditions, is finally underway.

The Europa Clipper launched Monday afternoon aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket that will power the spacecraft on a six-year journey to its namesake moon, an icy ocean world.

The launch was scheduled for Thursday, October 10, until the arrival of Hurricane Milton in Florida forced NASA and SpaceX to postpone the launch and house the large spacecraft in a hangar at the Kennedy Space Center. After Milton left the state, NASA and SpaceX teams returned to inspect the launch site at the Cape Canaveral spaceport before later giving the spacecraft the green light to return to the launch pad ahead of Monday's launch.

Weather conditions were much more favorable Monday as teams completed final preparations before the Clipper launched on NASA's $5 billion flagship mission that the U.S. space agency has been working on for years.

“Today we embark on a new journey through the solar system in search of the ingredients for life in Jupiter’s icy moon,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on the social media platform X. “Our next chapter of space exploration has begun.”

Here's everything you need to know about the Clipper mission and its launch over the Florida coast:

Europa Clipper launches from Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX rocket

The Europa Clipper lifted off at 12:06 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center.

Before liftoff, the spacecraft was encapsulated in a payload fairing designed to protect the Clipper from aerodynamic pressure and heat during liftoff before separating and falling back to Earth. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California designed the spacecraft to withstand both a launch on the Falcon Heavy rocket and the harsh conditions in the vacuum of space, NASA officials said.

After launch, 27 Merlin engines on the SpaceX rocket produced more than 5 million pounds of thrust to catapult the Clipper through the atmosphere and toward Jupiter.

The rocket uses side boosters that were also used on NASA's Psyche mission, which launched about a year ago. Due to the amount of energy Europa Clipper requires to escape Earth's gravity and reach its interplanetary trajectory, SpaceX does not plan to recover the boosters.

The spacecraft later successfully separated from the rocket's second stage while technicians worked to receive a signal from the clipper to check its condition as it deployed its massive solar arrays to power itself.

Ahead of the Clipper lies a 1.8 billion-mile journey to Europe on a trajectory that passes Mars and then Earth, using the planets' gravity as a slingshot to give the journey more speed. After more than five years of travel, the Clipper will start its engines in April 2030 to enter Jupiter's orbit.

What is the Europa Clipper mission?

Europa, the fourth largest of Jupiter's 95 moons, is an icy celestial body that scientists have long suspected may provide the conditions necessary for life beneath its surface. If these life-sustaining conditions actually exist, NASA hopes the Clipper can detect them.

While six spacecraft have visited and photographed Europa since Europa was one of the first moons found beyond Earth, the best evidence for a subsurface ocean was collected by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003.

Although Europa is slightly smaller than Earth's moon and barely a quarter the diameter of Earth, beneath its cracked, furrowed surface lies a vast salt ocean that could be up to 100 miles deep – or twice the size of Earth's oceans combined. Scientists have long theorized that the ice crust above the ocean hides clues to organic compounds and energy sources – the ingredients of life.

Astronomers believe ocean worlds like Europa are common outside our solar system. Therefore, studying the icy moon could prove to be the first step toward understanding the existence of life outside Earth. However, NASA officials have made one point clear: The Clipper is not searching for life itself; only the conditions that could support it.

So how does liquid thrive beneath the surface of a world whose temperature scientists estimate is between minus 208 and minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit? In a process called tidal flexion, the tidal forces of Jupiter's gravity expand and expose Europa's ocean and the icy shell above it, generating heat in the celestial body sufficient to maintain fluidity beneath an otherwise cold world.

The Clipper is tasked with studying Europa to find evidence of these organic compounds that form the building blocks of life, while also sampling any gases emitted by the Moon to find evidence that it could be habitable.

The Clipper spacecraft is NASA's largest of its kind

Powered by 24 engines, the Clipper features massive solar arrays and radar antennas, making it the largest spacecraft NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission.

The spacecraft is larger than a basketball court, stretching 100 feet from end to end and measuring about 58 feet in diameter. With a full tank, the Europa Clipper weighed almost 13,000 pounds at the time of launch.

At about 46.5 feet long and about 13.5 feet high, the orbiter's solar arrays are large enough to provide enough sunlight near Jupiter – which is more than five times further from the Sun than Earth collect to power the spaceship.

Although mission engineers planned orbits to limit the clipper's time amid Jupiter's most intense radiation, the spacecraft was also equipped with a thick-walled vault of titanium and aluminum to shield sensitive electronics.

Over the course of 49 close flybys of Europa, the clipper will collect and relay data to help scientists determine, for example, the salinity of the subsurface and the depth of the water. The Europa Clipper flybys will cover both hemispheres of the moon, with the closest of them being at an altitude of 16 miles above Europa's surface, NASA says.

Onboard, the Europa Clipper carries nine observation instruments, including cameras needed for high-resolution images and an ice-penetrating radar that will survey Europa's ice shell for signs of the Moon's suspected ocean. The radar will also study the structure and thickness of the ice as well as the topography, composition and roughness of the lunar surface.

The instruments, which will also study the moon's geology and atmosphere, will work simultaneously on each pass, allowing scientists to combine the data to paint a complete picture of the moon.

The NASA mission required years of advocacy and planning

According to the Planetary Society, the Europa Clipper mission took years to plan and required a grassroots effort to lobby for congressional funding to support the effort while NASA's budget shrank.

The Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that promotes space exploration, has championed the mission for more than a decade, at a time when budget cuts nearly put it on hold, Space Policy Director Casey Dreier told USA TODAY .

In a statement, Dreier praised the space agency for “taking a big, bold step” with the Clipper mission.

“Europa Clipper is one of the most exciting endeavors NASA has ever undertaken,” Dreier said in the statement. “Its mission is the essence of a publicly funded space agency: to reduce humanity's ignorance of the cosmos, to provide the resources necessary to withstand the harshest space environments billions of kilometers away, to do so peacefully and with curiosity, and to share the results with the world World.”

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and breaking news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]

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