Europa Clipper: What NASA’s Nine-Instrument Mission Is Built to Find
Europa Clipper launched on October 14, 2024, riding a SpaceX Falcon Heavy into deep space on a course for Jupiter. It will not arrive until April 2030. That five-and-a-half-year journey reveals how far NASA will go to answer one question. Does the ocean beneath Europa’s ice shell have the conditions to support life? This is not a speculative mission. Europa has a confirmed liquid water ocean, a source of internal heat driven by Jupiter’s gravity, and chemistry that includes salts and possibly organics. What Europa Clipper is going to answer is not whether the ocean exists (that was settled by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s) but what kind of Read more