On Monday, a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket used all its fuel to successfully launch Europa Clipper, one of NASA’s most important missions for the next decade.

An enormous probe. Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission, weighing 6 tons and equipped with 24 engines. It’s comparable in size only to the Juice probe, which the European Space Agency (ESA) is also sending to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. ESA’s spacecraft has solar panels that measure around 970 square feet when deployed.

Due to Europa Clipper’s size, weight, and destination, NASA opted to use a disposable Falcon Heavy rocket for the launch. The rocket’s side boosters, which have flown six times before, weren’t recovered and fell into the ocean after a particularly long ascent.

An intriguing destination. Europa Clipper will take five years to reach Europa, which has a saltwater ocean beneath its icy surface. Astronomers believe the ocean could be larger than all of Earth’s oceans combined, making Jupiter’s icy moon one of the best places in the solar system to search for extraterrestrial life.

After Falcon Heavy inserted it into orbit on Monday, Europa Clipper will conduct around 50 flybys of Europa after reaching Jupiter in 2030. NASA’s probe will receive assistance from Mars’ gravity in 2025 and Earth’s in 2026.

An important mission. With a budget of $5.2 billion, Europa Clipper is NASA’s most important planetary exploration mission for this decade. In fact, it’s the first that aims to investigate Europa and its potential habitability thoroughly.

Astronomers have had hints of water ice on Europa since the 1950s. However, the discovery of its subsurface ocean and the possibility of microbial life within it has highlighted the importance of a mission to Europa. This mission will be complemented by results from ESA’s Juice spacecraft, which, as mentioned earlier, is also headed for Jupiter’s icy moons.

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Years of delays. The Europa Clipper mission has been in development for more than a decade. In fact, the concept has been around for more than 20 years if you consider previous missions that were never carried out. In 2013, Europa Clipper secured NASA funding for instrument development, and by 2015, the space agency had chosen the nine instruments destined for the spacecraft.

Since 2015, the mission has gone through various design phases, including changing the launch rocket from NASA’s SLS to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy due to factors such as availability, cost, and launch vibrations. This was also done to avoid passing by Venus, which could affect the probe’s instruments.

A last-minute change. The mission suffered a last-minute delay due to Hurricane Milton. It pushed the launch date from October 10 to October 14, when Europa Clipper finally launched. Just a few weeks ago, it was uncertain whether NASA’s spacecraft would be launched. The space agency had discovered a defect in the 900 MOSFET transistors used to control all of the probe’s critical systems and instruments.

These transistors were at risk of failure in Europa’s radioactive environment. To address this issue, engineers quickly installed a monitoring unit on the spacecraft, like a “canary in the coal mine.” The unit can track the health of the MOSFETs and alert the control team on Earth of any potential failures, allowing them to implement mitigation strategies.

Good luck, Europa Clipper. On Monday, the spacecraft finally embarked on its mission to explore Europa. It’ll use high-resolution cameras (EIS and E-THEMIS), spectrometers (Europa-UVS and MISE), magnetometers (ECM and PIMS), an ice-penetrating radar (REASON), and chemical analyzers (MASPEX and SUDA).

The primary goal of the mission is to determine whether Europa is habitable. Although it won’t land, along with ESA’s Juice, it’ll help identify potential landing sites for future probes.

Image | Kevin Gill | NASA

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