Are we alone? Europa Clipper mission prepares to launch to Jupiter’s icy moon to help find out

NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory officials gave a sneak peek into the upcoming Europa Clipper mission, the first NASA spacecraft dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond our planet.

It will travel 1.8 billion miles from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Europa to see if Jupiter’s icy moon could support life and help answer the question — are we alone?

Laurie Leshin, director of JPL, said at a news conference Tuesday that scientists have been dreaming of this launch for more than 20 years.

“I often talk about these missions as modern cathedrals,” she said. “They are generational quests.”

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The goal of the mission

Scientists believe Europa, which is about the size of our moon, is one of the most promising places to look for life.

The moon, one of Jupiter’s four largest, is covered in a thick icy crust and is believed to be concealing a global saltwater ocean. That ocean may be up to 100 miles deep and large enough to hold more than twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined, according to JPL.

But the mission isn’t looking for life itself, it’s looking for the conditions of life: water, some type of chemical that can be food for organisms, and energy.

“So what we learn with Clipper, and the habitability of Europa, this is going to pave the way for the future,” said Gina DiBraccio, acting director of the planetary science division at NASA headquarters.

Scientists have discovered that other worlds in our solar system are also likely to have oceans beneath icy crusts, and if Europa is habitable, others might be too.

Europa’s surface, as seen by NASA’s Galileo mission.

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NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute

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The mission won’t land on the moon, instead taking a tour of dozens of flybys, getting as close as about 16 miles above the surface.

Those orbits will help the spacecraft spend less time in the “dangerous” and “punishing” radiation environment — the strongest of any planet in our solar system and second only to the sun, according to JPL.

About the Europa Clipper

The Europa Clipper mission, whose name was inspired by 19th century clipper ships, will weigh nearly 13,000 pounds at launch, nearly half of which is propellant.

A technician examines one of Europa Clipper’s solar arrays.

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NASA

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It’ll carry nine science instruments that’ll collect data from Europa’s atmosphere, surface, interior, and environment.

Those include visible-light cameras that’ll map Europa at a much better resolution than previous missions, including Galileo. A magnetometer aims to confirm an ocean exists, and measure its depth and salinity. A mass spectrometer will look at the gasses in the atmosphere and study the chemistry of the suspected ocean.

The spacecraft is powered by solar array “wings” that span more than 100 feet and will collect sunlight while it's around Jupiter, according to NASA.

It’s also carrying a poem by Ada Limón, cosigned by millions of people from nearly every country in the world, as part of a campaign called “Message in a Bottle.”

What’s next

The earliest it could launch is just a few weeks away on Oct. 10, and officials said they’re on track for that target. However, it could be pushed back into November if need be.

But a big challenge is just getting to Jupiter. The journey will take about five and a half years, until around April 2030.

“We have always uncovered things that we could not have imagined,” said Bonnie Buratti, deputy project scientist for the Europa Clipper at JPL. “There's going to be something there, the unknown, that is going to be so wonderful that we can't conceive of it right now, that’s the thing that excites me most.”