For decades, Jupiter's icy moon was considered one of the most promising places in the solar system for the search for extraterrestrial life. Europe is thought to have an underground ocean and a potentially habitable environment. Our cosmic backyard has long seemed like an exciting goal.
Now, humanity is ready to take a closer look at Jupiter's fourth-largest moon.
Early Monday afternoon, NASA plans to launch a new robotic mission to Jupiter. Nicknamed Europa Clipper, the probe is the largest spacecraft ever built for a planetary scientific mission.
The launch of the Europa Clipper on Monday at 12:06 a.m. ET aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is expected to face no further delays.
The launch was originally scheduled for Thursday, but NASA was forced to suspend it as Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday night near Siesta Key on the west coast of Florida. The Kennedy Space Center was closed as the storm moved across the state, hitting much of the Florida peninsula. Strong winds and heavy rain.
The delay was a small setback for a mission that took more than a decade of planning and development.
“It feels surreal,” said Jordan Evans, mission project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “There were battles at every level, from starting with the initial mission concept, through getting approval, through each milestone and overcoming various obstacles along the way. Right now, it’s incredible to see the team preparing.”
Europa Clipper is not on a life detection mission. Instead, it will study the composition of the ice-encased moon, including its interior composition and geology. This information could help scientists confirm whether Europa has the right ingredients to support life now – or if it ever did.
“We are looking for habitable environments,” said Bonnie Buratti, deputy mission project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We’re trying to find the essential thing for life, which is liquid water – and we’re sure it exists – the right chemistry and energy, whether it’s from active geology or something else, that acts almost like a battery to drive life. .”
Buratti says there is strong scientific evidence that a huge ocean is hidden beneath the moon's icy surface. Europa's interior ocean is, in fact, estimated to be twice the volume of all of Earth's oceans, according to NASA.
The Europa Clipper will enter Jupiter's orbit in 2030, after a six-year journey of 2.9 billion miles.
It will give researchers new insights through 49 close flybys of the Moon over four years.
“We will certainly know how thick the ice crust is and whether there are small ponds,” Buratti said. “With the ocean, I think we will finally understand how deep it is.”
To make these observations, the probe will fly through the harsh radiation environment generated by Jupiter's enormous magnetic field, which NASA says is about 20,000 times stronger than Earth's.
“If we study this in orbit around Europa, the radiation will likely kill even the most radiation-resistant electronic components within one to two months,” Evans said.
Instead, mission managers devised a way to orbit Jupiter in line with its icy moons — a kind of cosmic twin that would help protect its instruments from prolonged exposure to punishing radiation.
“So every six times Europa goes around Jupiter, or every 21 days, we will be right next to Europa, in the right place in the universe,” Evans said. “And each flyby will be different, so we can get global coverage of the Moon.”
But the team has to be patient. Before reaching Jupiter, the probe will first pass by Mars and then orbit Earth again, using the gravity of both planets to propel it into the depths of space.
Europa was discovered in 1610 by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. The icy body is the fourth largest of Jupiter's 95 known moons.
Several space probes have already observed Europa – including NASA's Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and Galileo missions – but this will be the first dedicated mission to the Moon and the first time NASA has studied the oceanic world beyond Earth.
This milestone was a long time coming for Buratti, who wrote his thesis on Europe when he was a graduate student at Cornell University in the 1980s.
“I’ve actually only been on this mission for two and a half years. I didn’t start it,” he said. “But I’m so happy to be back in something that’s so near and dear to my heart. It really is a dream.”
