Is there any other place in our solar system where life could exist? To begin the first comprehensive step towards discovering more, an enormous NASA spacecraft is scheduled to launch on Monday on a five-and-a-half-year voyage to Europa, one of Jupiter’s numerous moons.
The US space agency will be able to learn more about the moon—which, despite its frozen surface, scientists think may contain an ocean of liquid water—thanks to the Europa Clipper mission.
According to a NASA announcement, liftoff on a robust SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is planned on Monday, October 14, “no earlier than” from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“Europa is one of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth,” said NASA official Gina DiBraccio at a news conference last month.
The mission will not look directly for signs of life but will instead look to answer the question: Does Europa contain the ingredients that would allow life to be present?
If it does, another mission would then have to make the journey to try and 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 last month, “but a world that might be habitable today, right now.”
The probe is the biggest NASA has ever created for interplanetary travel.
When its massive solar panels, which are meant to absorb the meagre light that makes it to Jupiter, are fully extended, it measures 30 meters in width.
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