Europa Clipper Launches!

The Jupiter-bound mission seeks to discover if the icy moon contains the ingredients necessary to support life.

The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa looms large in this view made from images taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In the search for life beyond Earth, scientists have traveled to distant locations — Antarctica and its ice sheets, Chile and its high desert lakes, and even snow-capped mountain peaks. And in every single place, we have found life. So, what could we find elsewhere in our solar system with similar conditions? NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission will soon seek an answer to that question by studying the icy satellite of Jupiter, although the spacecraft will not arrive until 2030. Meanwhile, scientists, journalists, and streamers congregated in Florida, excited for the October launch of the mission atop a Falcon Heavy rocket. On 14 October at 12:06 p.m. EDT, the spacecraft lifted off from Kennedy Space Center and successfully deployed the enormous solar arrays that power the mission.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:06 p.m. EDT on Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Before anyone sets their expectations too high, Europa Clipper is not on a mission to find life but to determine how habitable the subsurface ocean may be. So, how do we know there’s a subsurface ocean?

From data collected by ground-based telescopes and previous missions, including NASA’s Galileo and Voyager, scientists discovered that Europa’s surface was composed of water ice, with very few craters. Few craters in solar system terms usually mean a young surface, so the water ice is being replenished somehow. That discovery led to an understanding that the resonant orbits of the Galilean moons cause regular gravitational pulls against Jupiter’s gravity, causing the moon interiors to heat up. Volcanic eruptions on Io were predicted from this hypothesis and eventually observed with Voyager 1 in 1979.

However, the evidence predicted a subsurface ocean under a thick icy shell for Europa rather than volcanism. The moons’ and Jupiter’s push and pull causes tidal heating that keeps the ocean liquid and could even cause hydrothermal venting on the ocean floor. Here on Earth, hydrothermal vents are prime locations for a wide variety of life forms that live off the nutrient-rich eruptions. As…