Nasa has launched Europa Clipper mission to investigate Jupiter and its moon, Europa, one of the prime locations in the search for life beyond Earth.
- The spacecraft launched on 14 October, is designed to study the moon’s icy surface and the subsurface ocean believed to exist beneath.
- It was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center, with the mission costing $5.2 billion.
- The largest spacecraft NASA ever built for a mission headed to another planet, Europa Clipper also is the first NASA mission dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond Earth.
- The spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) on a trajectory that will leverage the power of gravity assists, first to Mars in four months and then back to Earth for another gravity assist flyby in 2026.
- The main goal of the mission is to determine whether Europa has conditions that could support life.
- Europa is about the size of our own Moon, but its interior is different.
- Although Europa was discovered by Galileo in 1610, interest in its potential to support life has grown in recent decades,
- Information from NASA’s Galileo mission in the 1990s showed strong evidence that under Europa’s ice lies an enormous, salty ocean with more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
