NASA’s Europa Clipper probe blasted off from Florida on Monday, bound for an icy moon of Jupiter to discover whether it has the ingredients to support life.
Lift-off aboard a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket took place shortly after noon (1600 GMT), with the probe set to reach Jupiter’s moon Europa in five and a half years.
NASA later confirmed that it had successfully acquired a signal from the probe and that its massive solar arrays — designed to capture the weak light that reaches Jupiter — had fully unfolded.
The mission will allow the US space agency to uncover new details about Europa, which scientists believe could hold an ocean beneath its icy surface.
“With Europa Clipper, we’re not searching for life on Europa, but we’re trying to see if this ocean world is habitable, and that means we’re looking for the water,” NASA official Gina DiBraccio said ahead of the launch.
“We’re looking for energy sources, and we’re really looking for the chemistry there, so that we can understand what habitable environments might be throughout our whole universe,” she added.
If life’s ingredients are found, another mission would then have to make the journey to try to detect it.
“It’s a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago” like Mars, Europa Clipper program scientist Curt Niebur told reporters, “but a world that might be habitable today, right now.”
At 30 meters (98 feet) wide with its solar panels fully extended, the probe is the largest ever designed by NASA for interplanetary exploration.
Primitive life?
While Europa’s existence has been known since 1610, the first close-up images were taken by the Voyager probes in 1979, which revealed mysterious reddish lines crisscrossing its surface.
The next probe to reach Jupiter’s icy moon was NASA’s Galileo probe in the 1990s, which found it was highly likely that the moon was home to an ocean.
This time, the Europa Clipper carries a host of sophisticated instruments, including cameras, a spectrograph, radar and a magnetometer to measure its magnetic forces.