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A mission to study one of the solar system's most promising environments that may be suitable for life is about to get underway.
NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft - designed to explore its namesake, Jupiter's moon Europa - is expected to launch Monday at 12:06 a.m. ET aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The event will be streamed live on NASA's website, with coverage beginning at 11 a.m.
Weather conditions are 95% favorable for the launch, said Mike McAleenan, launch weather officer with the U.S. Space Force's 45th Weather Squadron.
If Europa Clipper does not depart on Monday, there will be launch options until November 6. Each launch opportunity is instantaneous, meaning the launch can only occur at one exact time each day, according to Tim Dunn, senior launch director at NASA's Launch Services Program.
The highly anticipated launch, initially scheduled for October 10, was delayed by Hurricane Milton. But crews on site at the center evaluated the launch facilities after the storm and cleared the spacecraft to return to the launch pad.
Europa Clipper will serve as NASA's first spacecraft dedicated to studying an ice-covered ocean world in our solar system, and aims to determine whether the moon could be habitable for life as we know it.
Clipper will carry nine instruments and a gravity experiment to explore the ocean beneath Europa's thick ice cover. It is estimated that the moon's ocean contains twice as much liquid water as Earth's oceans.
"The instruments work hand-in-hand to answer our most pressing questions about Europa," Robert Pappalardo, mission project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "We will learn what makes Europa tick, from its core and rocky interior to its ocean and ice shell to its very thin atmosphere and surrounding space environment."
The spacecraft also contains more than 2.6 million names submitted by people from countries around the world, and a poem by American poet Ada Limón.
The $5.2 billion mission began as a concept in 2013, but the road to launch was not without challenges.
In May, engineers discovered that parts of the spacecraft may not be able to withstand Jupiter's harsh radiation environment. However, the team managed to complete the necessary testing on time and receive approval to proceed with the launch in September, avoiding a 13-month delay to the launch without any changes to the mission plan, objectives or procedure.
There was no more difficult year than this to get Europa Clipper across the finish line, says Curt Niebur, Europa Clipper program scientist.
"But despite all that, we never doubted that this would be worth it," Niebur said. "It's an opportunity for us to explore, not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today - an opportunity to do the first exploration of this new kind of world that we discovered very recently. recently mentioned an ocean world completely submerged and covered in an ocean of liquid water, completely unlike anything we've seen before. That is what awaits us in Europe."
What to expect after launch
After launch, the spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles and is expected to arrive at Jupiter in April 2030. Along the way, the spacecraft will fly past Mars and then Earth, using each planet's gravity to help the spacecraft use less fuel and gain speed on their journey to Jupiter.
Europa Clipper will work with Juice, or the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, spacecraft, launched in April 2023 by the European Space Agency, which will arrive in July 2031 to study Jupiter and its largest moons.
The largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission, the Clipper is 30.5 meters wide thanks to its solar panels - longer than a basketball court. The huge panels will help absorb enough sunlight to power the spacecraft's instruments and electronics as it explores Europa, which is five times further away from the sun than Earth.
Once the spacecraft arrives, it will carry out its mission by flying past Europa 49 times instead of landing on the moon's surface.
Mission teams initially worried that Clipper wouldn't be able to withstand Jupiter's harsh environment because the giant planet's magnetic field - which traps and accelerates charged particles and produces radiation that damages spacecraft - is 20,000 times stronger than Earth's. But engineers have found a way around that problem.
Each flyby of Europa, expected every two to three weeks, will leave the spacecraft exposed to Jupiter's punishing radiation for less than a day before returning to a loop. The time between flybys can help the spacecraft's transistors, which help control the vehicle's electricity flow, recover from radiation exposure.
Meanwhile, a specially designed titanium and aluminum vault protects the spacecraft's sensitive electronics from radiation.
Ultimately, the flybys will bring the Clipper within 16 miles of the surface, hovering over a different Europa location each time. This strategy allows the spacecraft to map almost the entire moon.
And once the mission is complete, the spacecraft's journey may end by colliding with the surface of Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, although that has yet to be determined.
The seductive potential for life
Europa Clipper is not designed to look for evidence of life on Europa, but will use a range of instruments to see if life could be possible in an ocean on another planet in our solar system.
Astronomers believe the ingredients for life, including water, energy and the right chemistry, may already be present on Europa. The spacecraft could collect evidence to find out if these ingredients coexist in a way that might make the moon's environment habitable.
The mission will investigate the exact thickness of the ice layer that envelops the moon and how that frozen exterior interacts with the ocean below, as well as characterize the moon's geology. Scientists are eager to know the exact composition of the ocean and what causes the previously observed plumes to rise through cracks in the ice and send particles into space. They also want to determine whether material from Europe's surface ends up in the ocean.
To conduct thorough research, Europa Clipper is equipped with cameras and spectrometers to capture high-resolution images and create maps of the moon's surface and thin atmosphere. The spacecraft also carries a thermal instrument to detect locations of plume activity and where the ice is warmer. A magnetometer will study the moon's magnetic field and confirm the existence of the European ocean, as well as its depth and salinity.
An ice-penetrating radar will look beneath the outer shell, estimated to be about 15 to 25 kilometers thick, for evidence of the moon's ocean.
And if there are active plumes blowing particles from the European ocean into space, the spacecraft's mass spectrometer and dust analyzer will be able to "sniff" the particles and analyze their composition, says Haje Korth, deputy project scientist for Europa Clipper at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Science. Physics Laboratory.
"The mass spectrometer and dust detector data will show whether Europa harbors the composition and chemistry necessary to support life," Korth said.
All instruments will be turned on and working during each flight to collect as much data as possible.
The Europa Clipper team is often asked about their hopes for what the spacecraft will discover in Europa, and how it could set the stage for future explorations in the search for life beyond our planet.
"To me, that would mean finding some kind of oasis, if you will, on Europa, where there is evidence of liquid water not far below the surface, and evidence of organic matter on the surface," Pappalardo said. "Maybe it would be warm, maybe it would be the source of a plume. That could be somewhere where, in the future, NASA might be able to send a lander to dive beneath the surface and literally look for signs of life."
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