Falcon Heavy launches NASA’s Europa Clipper mission

MILAN – A long-awaited mission to study whether an icy moon of Jupiter could harbor life is on its way after a Falcon Heavy rocket launched Oct. 14.

The Falcon Heavy lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at 12:06 p.m. Eastern Time. After the second of two upper stage burns that put it on an escape trajectory toward Earth, the Europa Clipper spacecraft separated from the stage just over an hour after launch. Minutes later, the spacecraft contacted ground controllers and sent back telemetry data showing it was in good condition.

Europa Clipper is one of NASA’s most expensive science missions to date, with an estimated total lifecycle cost, including the four years of operation after arrival at Jupiter in 2030, of $5.2 billion. It has been a top priority for flagship-class planetary science missions in decades of study by planetary scientists and has been based on proposals for Europa orbiters or flyby missions for at least two decades.

That interest was tied to the mission’s goal of finding out whether Europa, a moon of Jupiter that is thought to have a subterranean ocean beneath its icy surface, could harbor life. The combination of liquid water, energy from the lunar interior and the presence of organic compounds would give the moon all the basic ingredients it needs to live.

The spacecraft will not search for life itself, but rather will test whether the moon has the right conditions to support life. “We continue to emphasize that Europa Clipper is not actually a life discovery mission, but rather a habitability study,” said Gina DiBraccio, acting director of NASA’s planetary science division, at an Oct. 13 briefing about the science of mission.

“We want to understand whether Europa has the key ingredients to support life in its oceans,” Robert Pappalardo, Europa Clipper project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at the meeting.

Europa Clipper is equipped with nine special instruments as well as a gravity and radio science experiment. These instruments, ranging from cameras and spectrometers to magnetometers, will study Europa and its interior during 49 flybys that will provide “near complete coverage” of the moon, he said.

This instrument load requires a large spacecraft. The spacecraft weighed 5,700 kilograms with a full tank at launch and its solar arrays will make the spacecraft 30.5 meters long when fully deployed.

The spacecraft also needs shielding to protect it from radiation in the form of charged particles accelerated by Jupiter’s strong magnetic field. However, despite this shielding, there were concerns that the spacecraft’s transistors could become weaker, requiring changes to the mission profile or even replacement, which would have delayed the mission. NASA decided in September that the transistors could survive the baseline mission.

Development challenges and associated costs posed a risk to the mission in its early development phase. However, the mission had a champion in former Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), who had a strong personal interest in the mission and in his role as a member and later chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds NASA, ensured that the mission received funding that often far exceeded the agency’s requirements.

Culberson had also pushed for NASA to launch the Europa Clipper with its Space Launch System, which would have allowed a direct trip to Jupiter in less than three years. However, NASA warned in 2020 that “potential hardware compatibility issues” made it unwise to launch Europa Clipper on SLS, and Congress eventually relented and allowed NASA to solicit bids for a commercial launch. The prize was won in 2021 by SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy for $178 million, a very small fraction of the estimated cost of a single SLS.

However, Falcon Heavy could not send Europa Clipper directly to Jupiter, even if all three booster cores were used up, as was the case with this launch. Instead, the spacecraft will fly past Mars early next year and Earth at the end of 2026, reaching Jupiter in April 2030.

For scientists, however, the expected scientific benefits will be worth the wait. “I’ve dreamed of going back to Europe since the Galileo era, about 25 years,” Cynthia Phillips, a research associate with the Europa Clipper project at JPL, said at the meeting. “I have been actively working on the Europa Clipper project for almost ten years and can’t wait to finally get new close-up images of Europa’s surface. I know I have to be patient for another six years.”

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