Europa Clipper Launches!
The Jupiter-bound mission seeks to discover if the icy moon contains the ingredients necessary to support life.
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.
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?
