NASA's Europa Clipper blasts off, seeking an ocean

What happened

Europa Clipper, the largest extraplanetary spacecraft ever built by NASA, took off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center Monday atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, headed toward Jupiter. The spacecraft, which is the size of a basketball court with its solar wings unfurled, carries an array of nice specialized instruments to study an ocean believed to be buried 10 to 15 miles under the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa.

Who said what

Europa Clipper's historic mission "will tackle one of biology's core questions," The New York Times said: "Can life exist anywhere else in our solar system?" The spacecraft "won't look for life" directly, The Associated Press said. Instead its instruments — cameras, magnetometer, thermal imager and an ice-penetrating radar, among others — "will zero in on the ingredients necessary to sustain life," including organic compounds.

"We want to determine if Europa has the potential to support simple life in the deep ocean under its icy layer," said mission chief scientist Robert Pappalardo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We don't expect fish and whales and that kind of thing." Europa isn't the only documented ocean world, but its ocean is most similar to Earth's, said program scientist Curt Niebur. "If Europa Clipper can show that in our one solar system there are two habitable worlds — Earth and Europa — that has profound implications for how common habitable worlds are in the galaxy."

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What next?

Europa Clipper's 1.8 billion-mile journey is expected to take 5 1/2 years. It should enter Jupiter's orbit on April 11, 2030, before making 49 flybys of Europa over the next four years, coming within 16 miles of the moon's surface.