NASA and SpaceX launch Europa Clipper to Jupiter’s moon

Europa Clipper, the largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built by NASA, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Monday afternoon.

The mission will address one of biology’s fundamental questions: Could life exist anywhere else in our solar system?

The spacecraft’s destination is Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, where water flows beneath a layer of ice that could be more than 10 miles thick. Such oceanic worlds are fairly common in the outer solar system. This has raised speculation: Could there be life swimming in any of those oceans?

For now, the answer might be interesting.

The $5.2 billion Europa Clipper mission is NASA’s first dedicated to filling in the blanks on the habitability of these oceanic worlds.

“I think Europa is definitely the most likely place for extraterrestrial life in our solar system,” said Robert Pappalardo, Europa Clipper project scientist. “This is because it is likely to contain the ingredients for life in abundance and have enough time for life to begin.”

At liftoff, the Europa Clipper weighed about 12,500 pounds, about half of which was propellant. After the two solar panels deployed, the spacecraft extended more than 100 feet, a little longer than a basketball court.

The powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carried the spacecraft from Earth to orbit around the sun. A flyby of Mars next February will give it a boost of gravity, then it will swing back around Earth in December 2026 to gain additional acceleration toward its destination.

After a five-and-a-half-year, 1.8 billion-mile journey, Europa Clipper is scheduled to enter orbit around Jupiter on April 11, 2030. It will then make 49 flybys of Europa over four years.

Since Earth is the only place where life is known to exist, it is not surprising that scientists believe that the most promising place to look for life would be somewhere similar: an Earth-like planet that would be neither too cold nor too warm, with temperatures that would allow for liquid water, essential for life as we know it. , flowing to the surface.

The region around a star with such mild conditions is known as the habitable zone, or for fairy tale fans, the Goldilocks zone.

In our solar system, only Earth meets the “just right” criteria. But it turns out that liquid water is very common in the outer solar system, hiding under icy shells. Europa was the first world where planetary scientists found compelling evidence of an invisible ocean, and in fact, they now believe it could contain twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined.

Other worlds thought to have oceans include Callisto and Ganymede, two other large icy moons of Jupiter; Enceladus and Mimas orbit Saturn; Triton around Neptune. Even Pluto, the dwarf planet.

In addition to water, other essential components of life are thought to be energy and carbon-based molecules. This mission aims to study whether these organisms exist in Europe as well.

To do this, the spacecraft carries nine instruments, including cameras, spectrometers, a magnetometer and radar. Through its observations, scientists expect to measure the depth of the ocean, identify some of the compounds found on Europa’s surface, and accurately map the moon’s magnetic field, which will provide additional clues about what lies within.

None of the instruments will directly look for anything living, only whether conditions inside Europa could support life.

Jupiter’s massive gravity pushes and pulls on Europa’s interior, and the heat of friction could fuel hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Vents can spew chemicals known as reductants into the ocean.

On the surface, radiation bombardment from Jupiter on the ice produces oxidizing materials. When oxidants and reducing substances combine, energy is released, chemical reactions that can power life.

But for that to happen, the oxidants on Europa’s surface must somehow move across miles of ice into the ocean.

The key is that the ice on Europa is not a simple solid crust, just as the Earth’s crust is not a simple solid piece of rock.

Under pressure beneath the surface, ice becomes bendable. Warm blobs of ice rise to the surface and cold, denser blobs sink, likely carrying oxidants downward — a pattern of convection similar to how the mantle rises and falls inside the Earth.

This could be the conveyor belt that transports surface chemicals to the ocean.

“It’s highly anticipated to be a lava lamp,” said Donald Blankenship, a research professor at the University of Texas Geophysics Institute and principal investigator for Europa Clipper’s ice-penetrating radar instrument.

Sounds from the spacecraft’s radar will almost easily pass through ice and snow but bounce off salt water. So Europa Clipper may be able to see all the way through the ice and into the ocean.

Radar can also detect lakes buried within ice, and cryovolcanoes that erupt water, not molten rock.

The ship’s onboard thermal imager will look for warm spots, which can indicate places where the ice is thinner and the ocean is closer to the surface.

A tube-shaped instrument roughly the length of a piece of French bread will capture and identify molecules from the thin atmosphere, including carbon-based molecules that could serve as building blocks for life.

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected what could be plumes of water vapor intermittently erupting from Europa’s surface. With luck, the Europa Clipper could fly through an explosive plume, which could be material from the ocean.

Another instrument, an ultraviolet spectrometer, can also identify molecules inside a plume when a distant star passes behind Europa. Europa is expected to obscure stars in this way about 100 times during the mission. Looking at how the colors of ultraviolet light emitted by the faint star will determine the density of the gases and what they are made of.

It has been a long, slow journey to get the Europa Clipper mission to the launch pad.

When Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter in 1979, its images of Europa showed something that looked like a wet ball — a bright but broken surface almost devoid of craters, indicating that some geological process was wiping it out.

This has piqued scientists’ curiosity to learn more, especially after measurements of Europa’s magnetic fields made by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft two decades ago provided compelling evidence of the presence of a layer of salty water.

“We started planning the mission in about 1995, 30 years ago,” said Tom McCord, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute working on the mission. “It’s taken a long time to get to the point where we have the opportunity to send the instrument and others on their way on a six-year journey to actually start making measurements.”

For a long time, senior officials at NASA headquarters in Washington were not particularly interested in Europe.

However, John Culberson, a Texas Republican elected to Congress in 2000, was very interested.

Mr. Culberson remembers visiting NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California when the Opportunity rover landed on Mars in 2004. Engineers at the laboratory gave summaries of what they were working on, and the mission that piqued his curiosity was to visit several of Jupiter’s large moons, including Europe.

“I found out they were not receiving any support from headquarters,” Mr. Culberson said. So, as a member of the Appropriations Committee, he added money to the mission.

He was upset and frustrated when NASA officials spent money on a different project. “We’ve been saving money for Europe year after year, and NASA has figured out ways around that,” he said.

Part of NASA’s reluctance was fear that the costs of the ambitious Europa mission might spiral out of control.

In 2010, Dr. Pappalardo brought together scientists and engineers from inside and outside NASA to brainstorm ideas on how to make the mission smaller and more affordable. Half of the small team were people who had previously worked on mission design. The other half were people who criticized it, Dr. Pappalardo said.

He noted that he began the first meeting by presenting a blank slide. “We started with a blank sheet of paper,” Dr. Pappalardo said.

Originally, the spacecraft was scheduled to enter orbit around Europa. The analysis ultimately showed that almost all of the science could be accomplished through multiple flights, reducing the amount of shielding and fuel the spacecraft needed.

While serving on the Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA, Mr. Culberson championed Europa Clipper and its ability to detect extraterrestrial life. He also wanted NASA to include a lander.

“This is a real opportunity to reignite public passion for the space program,” he said.

But the Obama administration had other priorities for NASA. Her 2014 budget request included money not only for Mission Europe. He flatly stated that NASA couldn’t afford one “for the foreseeable future.”

The Planetary Society, a non-profit organization that advocates for space exploration, has also campaigned on behalf of Europe. “Never before have we reached out to members in this way,” said Casey Dreyer, the association’s head of space policy. “I think we helped solidify that as something that should be done, something that has support.”

Under the Trump administration, the Europe Clipper mission finally gained momentum and significant budgets.

Mr. Culberson lost his re-election bid in 2018. The Europa Clipper survived. But the landing proposal, which could have added billions of dollars to the cost, did not happen.

The mission faced additional obstacles. Originally, Mr. Culberson and Congress authorized the plane to fly on the Space Launch System, a massive rocket developed by NASA that costs an estimated $4 billion per launch.

Congress relented on this condition, and in 2021 NASA awarded SpaceX the Falcon Heavy launch contract for just $178 million.

This year, Europa Clipper appeared to be in jeopardy again when it emerged that transistors on the spacecraft may be faulty and thus unable to survive the harsh radiation around Jupiter. But engineers found that as the spacecraft swung farther, the transistors recovered, and NASA moved forward with the launch.

Hurricane Milton caused another brief delay when it passed over the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, the original launch date.

On Monday, Culberson watched from a balcony at the launch site as the rocket carrying the Europa Clipper soared upward through the clear blue Florida sky.

“I’m still walking on cloud nine,” he said afterward. “An impeccable start to a potentially civilization-changing mission.”

Some recent research has cast doubt on hopes for life on Europa.

Two studies presented at this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference suggest that there may not be any volcanic activity on Europa’s seafloor. Also, the rocks there may not break down easily, reducing chemical reactions between ocean water and rocks that can provide energy for living organisms.

Although there may be molten rock deep inside Europa, “it seems very difficult for that magma to be able to rise anywhere near the ocean floor,” said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was an author on the paper. the topic. Both papers.

Dr. Byrne said that even if life had arisen around Europa a long time ago, it “seems difficult to sustain such life today.” “That’s really what I think these studies are starting to tell us.”

This does not mean that Dr. Byrne thinks the Europa Clipper is a $5 billion waste.

“Clipper is exactly the kind of mission we need to start gradually building on our understanding of habitability,” he said, adding that he hopes it will be the first in “a series of missions, not just to Europe, but to many more.” The so-called oceanic worlds.”

It’s been a long wait. Dr. McCord, the scientist who began working on plans for Europe around 1995, is now 85 years old.

“I’ll be 91 or something” when the Europa Clipper reaches its destination, he said. “This is an endeavor that transcends people’s lives.”