NASA launches world’s largest ever spacecraft
October 15, 2024
NASA has launched the Europa Clipper, the largest spacecraft NASA ever built for a mission to another planet. Europa Clipper also is the first NASA mission dedicated to studying an ocean planet beyond Earth – Jupiter’s moon Europa..
The Europa Clipper spacecraft was carried aloft atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and blasted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:06 p.m. EDT on Monday, 14 October, 2024.
NASA’s Europa Clipper has embarked on its long voyage to Jupiter, where it will investigate Europa, a moon with an enormous subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life. Europa is about the size of our own Moon, but its interior is believed to be very different. NASA’s Galileo mission in the 1990s provided strong evidence that an enormous, salty ocean lies under Europa’s ice. This is thought to contain more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
Scientists also have found evidence that Europa may host organic compounds and energy sources under its surface.
Europa Clipper’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean thought to exist beneath it, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The main goal of the mission is to determine whether Europa has conditions that could support life.
The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand whether the ocean could support life, and will give an understanding of the astrobiological potential of habitable worlds beyond our planet. If the mission determines that Europa is habitable, it may mean that there are more habitable worlds than was previously imagined.
About five minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s second stage fired up and the rocket’s nose cone (payload fairing) opened to reveal the spacecraft. The Europa Clipper spacecraft separated from the rocket about one hour after launch. Two-way communication between the craft and ground controllers at NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, was established at 1:13 pm. Initial telemetry reports showed that Europa Clipper is in good health and operating as expected.
The spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) on a trajectory that will leverage the power of gravity assists. The first of these will be around Mars in four months time, before another gravity assist flyby of Earth in 2026. After it begins orbiting Jupiter in April 2030, the spacecraft will fly past Europa 49 times, conducting its first science-dedicated flybys of Europa in 2031, passing as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers) of Europa’s surface.
Europa Clipper is equipped with nine science instruments and a gravity experiment, including an ice-penetrating radar, cameras, and a thermal instrument to look for areas of warmer ice and any recent eruptions of water. As the most sophisticated suite of science instruments NASA has ever sent to Jupiter, they will work in concert to learn more about the moon’s icy shell, thin atmosphere, and deep interior.
To power those instruments in the faint sunlight that reaches Jupiter, Europa Clipper carries the largest solar arrays NASA has ever used for an interplanetary mission. With arrays extended, the spacecraft spans 100 feet (30.5 meters) from end to end. With propellant loaded, it weighs about 13,000 pounds (5,900 kilograms).
