NASA Launches Largest-Ever Planetary Spacecraft on a 'Generational Quest' to Jupiter’s Moon Europa

An artist’s concept of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft.Photo byNASA/JPL-Caltech

This month, NASA is set to launch its most ambitious planetary spacecraft yet, the Europa Clipper, to study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. This ‘generational quest,’ as NASA scientists have dubbed it, has been in the works for a staggering twenty years. The spacecraft, a product of ten years of meticulous construction, will embark on a five-and-a-half-year journey to reach Jupiter and begin its mission. Europa is widely considered the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to sustain some form of life in its global ocean of water.

The Europa Clipper, as it's known, will not orbit Europa directly due to the moon's harsh particle accelerator atmosphere. Instead, it will execute a groundbreaking strategy of completing 80 orbital revolutions around Jupiter, with some orbits bringing it as close as 25km to Europa's surface. This mission, aimed at enhancing our understanding of potential life in extreme environments beyond Earth, will focus on studying Europa’s ice shell, its subsurface ocean, and its composition and geology.

The $5 billion Europa Clipper mission had been scheduled to launch on Oct. 10 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Florida's Atlantic Coast. But Hurricane Milton has delayed its launch date. It's too early to predict when Clipper will be able to fly, but the mission has a launch window that extends through Nov. 6.

NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft is seen shortly before it is encapsulated inside the payload fairing of its SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.Photo bySpaceX

The Europa Clipper, a colossal spacecraft standing as tall as the Statue of Liberty and weighing as much as an elephant, is a marvel of engineering. It has massive solar panels to harness the sunlight around Jupiter for additional power. The spacecraft also houses a suite of instruments, including an ice-penetrating radar to explore the sub-surface ocean, a magnetometer to decipher Europa’s gravity, a thermal instrument to detect warmer ocean areas, and a spectrograph. These tools, along with the spacecraft's planned ‘flybys’-a maneuver where the spacecraft passes by a celestial body at close range without entering its orbit-that will cover both the moon's hemispheres and various latitudes, will provide a near-global understanding of Europa. 

Europa Clipper will provide clues to the overturning of the ice and ocean and the chemistry of the deeper interior.Photo byD. Hinkle

In addition to the many scientific instruments on board, the ‘Europa Clipper’ will also carry a piece of human culture. A new work by the US poet Laureate Ada Limón, who wrote the poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” written specifically for this mission at the invitation of the US Library of Congress and NASA. The poem is dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clippers mission as part of the agency’s “Message in the Bottle Campaign” to add pieces of culture to scientific missions. You can read and listen to the poem here.