KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter’s ocean moon is not looking for life, but will see if life could be possible there. It’s a step that could help the bigger hunt beyond our solar system.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy carrying the largest satellite ever built for NASA’s planetary science missions lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A at 12:06 p.m. Monday.
The rocket surged off the pad with 5.1 million pounds of thrust streaking up into the clear blue skies over the Space Coast with the soundwave hitting the KSC press site with a deafening thunder that shook the metal railings and windows of buildings and set off car alarms.
Falcon Heavy lifts off from pad 39A in Florida for the 11th time! pic.twitter.com/tcZu1LOOOm
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 14, 2024
This as the sixth and final flights of the two side boosters, as no recovery was possible with all of their energy needed combined with the center core to send Europa Clipper on its 1.8 billion mile journey.
“NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will fill important gaps in our understanding of ocean worlds in our solar system and beyond,” said NASA’s acting director of its Planetary Science Division, Gina DiBraccio, during a press conference Sunday. “Exploring Europa is a high priority for NASA. One of our key science activities is to study how life in the solar system has originated and evolved. So with Clipper, we will explore the habitability of Europa in order to determine if it can host life.”
This marks the first dedicated mission to a moon of one of the other planets in our galaxy.
“We’ve had spacecraft explore every planet in our solar system, and most recently, we’ve even had dedicated missions to small bodies. But up until now, as far as moons of the other planets are concerned, we’ve really only had flybys from other missions,” she said.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA – APRIL 11: The NASA Europa Clipper spacecraft is viewed inside a Spacecraft Assembly Facility clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on April 11, 2024 in Pasadena, California. The spacecraft is scheduled to investigate and perform flybys of Europa, Jupiter’s moon, where data suggests a global ocean of water lies beneath the icy surface which may be habitable for life. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in October. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
She reiterated the mission is not about whether or not there’s life on the planet. The target planet is about the size of Earth’s moon, but covered in ice that could be miles thick. The suspicion is there could be a watery ocean underneath. The moon is one of four icy moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo centuries ago, and has more than twice as much ocean as the Earth does.
“Clipper is not a life detection mission, but we are searching for whether Europa is habitable – a habitable environment,” she said. “So just from kind of the NASA standpoint, in terms of our mission, it would be premature to have a life-detection mission sent to Europa, and we are really taking those first steps to see if Europa is even habitable.”
The $5.2 billion probe won’t reach Jupiter until 2030. Fully fueled, the satellite weighs about 13,000 pounds. Its girth required the power afforded by SpaceX’s heavy lift Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9’s strapped together. Falcon Heavy is making its 11th launch ever and only the second of 2024. It’s also the second ever NASA launch for Falcon Heavy having launched the Psyche asteroid probe in late 2023.
Robert Pappalardo, a mission project scientist out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the probe will orbit Jupiter but make 49 closeup trips to the moon to provide nearly complete coverage of the planetoid.
He said it’s difficult endeavor because of several hurdles.
“The distance of Jupiter five times farther from the Sun than the Earth is, means it’s very cold out there,” he said.
The solar arrays that will unfold on the satellite will be 46 feet long and 13 feet high each so that when unfurled, Europa Clipper will be about the length of a basketball court.
Pappalardo also said Jupiter will lambast the probe with charged particles.
“Jupiter acts like a giant particle accelerator,” he said. “A human would receive a lethal dose of radiation in just a few minutes to a few hours, if exposed to that environment.”
The exciting thing of the mission to him is just how common Europa might be elsewhere in the universe, and what studying it could mean for future exploration.
“We know of our Earth as an ocean world, but Europa is representative of a new class of ocean worlds – icy worlds in the distant outer solar system, where saltwater oceans might exist under their icy surfaces,” he said. “In fact, icy ocean worlds could be the most common habitat for life, not just in our solar system, but throughout the universe.”
Years in the making, he said finally approaching a launch date has been overwhelming.
“We’re at the threshold of a new era of exploration,” he said. “We’ve been working on this mission for so long, we’re going to learn how common or rare, habitable icy worlds may be.”
Cynthia Phillips, project staff scientist at NASA JPL, said the probe has nine dedicated science instruments as well as a gravity and radio science investigation. It features remote imaging sensors to observe Europa’s surface and subsurface using light in different wavelengths. It also has instruments to measure gasses and dust particles as well as magnetic fields and gravity fields.
For imaging, more than 90% of the moon will be captured at resolutions of less than 100 meters per pixel, or about 325 feet, about the size of city block, she said. But a narrow angle camera on board will go ever closer with about 1.6 feet per pixel.
“So it’ll be able to see car-sized objects on the surface of Europa,” she said.
A flyby image from the Galileo probe taken in the 1990s is the best view NASA has had so far of the moon,
“Europa Clipper’s cameras will be able to observe at 12 times better resolution over a much larger portion of the surface, and I just can’t wait to see what we find,” she said.
It’s equipped also with a ultraviolet spectrograph, thermal imager, near-infrared spectrometer and an ice-penetrating radar instrument that might be able to detect what’s under the surface of the moon to a depth of 19 miles.
Haje Korth, a deputy project scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory delved into the field and particle instruments, likening them to “how we smell and taste Europa.”
It has three particle instruments to detect the moon’s chemistry, a magnetometer to measure its magnetic field and a gravity and radio science experiment delve to the interior of the planetoid.
The magnetometer is key to determining if Europa has the ingredients to support life, he said.
“Jupiter’s magnetic field is 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s, and Europa’s exposure to this environment generates secondary fields within the moon’s global ocean,” he said. “We will measure the magnetic field, and from these observations, will determine the thickness of Europa’s ice shell and ocean. We will also be able to infer how salty. And thus habitable the ocean.”
The probe will fly by and close enough to the moon’s thin atmosphere every two to three weeks so that one of its particle instruments can “sniff” particles that have come off the surface, allowing the probe to get a more detailed take on the moon’s chemistry, including any active plumes that might be coming off the surface, as well as a dust environment from the surface created when tiny meteorites strike it.
“The mass spectrometer and dust detector data will show whether Europa harbors the composition and chemistry required to host life,” he said.
Pappalardo said the greatest outcome for him would be all the instruments working together so “it would be to find some sort of oasis, if you like, on Europa where there’s evidence of liquid water not far below the surface, evidence of organics on the surface.”
“Maybe it would be warm, maybe it would be the source of a plume, and that could be somewhere that in the future, maybe NASA could send a lander to scoop down below the radiation process surface and literally search for signs of life,” he said.
Pappalardo pointed out what the mission finds could bring new questions.
“We know how to search for life as we know it. We don’t know how to search for life as we don’t know it,” he said. “So it’s logical to say, let’s understand this environment as to whether life as we know and understand it could potentially survive and thrive there.”
Phillips said loading up Europa with as many instruments as it has will help solve that.
“It’s not dependent on any one kind of life detection. And so, you know, I’d love to have a (Star Trek) tricorder. You could just point at something and it says, ‘It’s life Jim’, but no one’s built me one yet.”
So instead the broad suite of instruments will have to do.
“We basically have a series of kind of indirect clues (with instruments) to study the composition, to study the actual makeup of some of the gas particles and dust particles that are coming off the surface. And so maybe we’ll find clues for something that’s really suspicious and interesting, that looks like some kind of life,” she said. “Maybe it will be life as we don’t know it. I think that this is one where scientists are going to be debating the results of this mission, no matter what we find.”