KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — NASA's Europa Clipper mission on Monday launched a satellite to investigate Europa, Jupiter’s “mysterious moon” — a world covered in ice that scientists say could have an ocean under it.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket took off as scheduled from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 12:06 p.m. ET.

The launch was supposed to take place on Thursday, Oct. 10, but Hurricane Milton forced NASA to postpone it.

Europa: A little moon with a chance of life

At last count, Jupiter has 95 moons, but the four main ones — Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa — were discovered in 1610 by famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. But their names came from German astronomer Simon Marius in 1614 but they are also known as the Galilean moons.

The moon is a world unlike Earth’s celestial sibling: With a very thin oxygen atmosphere, it has an icy surface with a possible ocean underneath it. And in 2019, water vapor was detected for the first time above its surface with the use of a spectrograph at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

With a possible ocean and likely water vapor, Europa has whetted the appetite of many astronomers and researchers as to what this moon may hold besides ice.

“Europa’s ocean may be the most energetic place to find life elsewhere in our solar system. Its global ocean may be billions of years old and might have seen extensive volcanic activity over that history, generating the ingredients needed for life,” Dr. Steve Vance, Deputy Section manager of the Europa Clipper mission, explained to Spectrum News. “We want to know if volcanic rifts are creating hot springs like those we see in Earth’s seafloor, which are often teeming with exotic life.”

Vance explained in an email that researchers want to know if radiation at Europa’s surface creates oxygen-rich materials for life in the ocean world.

University of Florida’s Dr. Amy Williams agrees that water plays a big part in the possibility of life under Europa’s icy surface.

“Water and in particular, oceans, have been an enticing target in the search for life beyond Earth, in part because life-as-we-know-it requires water as the universal solvent. An ocean of water has the potential to provide a substantial habitable environment for that life,” Williams, an astronomer and an astrobiologist, stated in an email to Spectrum News.

If Europa does have an ocean under its surface and if there is life in there, it opens up all sorts of questions, Vance said, such as, does Europan life have DNA similar to what is seen on Earth?

Would this life have cells with membranes like the life we know on Earth? Vance explained that there such a finding welcomes a lot of answers and questions.

“Finding life in our solar system would provide clues to the basic workings of life, not just whether we’re alone, but whether the evolution of life takes similar paths as it did on Earth. In my more optimistic moments I imagine ecosystems supporting fish and other multicellular life. Oxygen generated at Europa’s surface might have provided the kind of chemical energy needed to support such life,” stated Vance, who is also an astrobiologist.

Williams speculated that if Europa has an ocean, it is important to establish if it is habitable to life as we know it or even life as we don’t know it.

“Certainly, the question of whether we’re alone in the universe is one of the most compelling and profound questions we can ask as a species. …  Although we will not physically access the Europan ocean, if there is life, I would expect it to consist of single-celled micro-organisms, close to the rocky crust at the bottom of the ocean. Perhaps those microbial communities exist close to hydrothermal vents where they mine energy from the rocks and hot water, similar to the chemosynthetic organisms that live on hydrothermal vents all over the terrestrial ocean floor,” she described.

Getting to know the Europa Clipper

The Europa Clipper mission got the green light from NASA in 2015, revealed Vance, as engineers and scientists worked together to design and build a spacecraft to reach one of Jupiter’s famed Galilean moons.

But the dream of going to Europa started much earlier.

“The name Europa Clipper goes back to as early as 1999. We’ve been dreaming of a mission like this since the Galileo mission arrived in the 1990s and provided the strongest evidence we have for an ocean under Europa’s ice. The idea was to explore the first discovered ocean world using a custom ship designed to zip by its surface. That idea evokes the age of large sailing ships, including the fast clipper ships that were designed starting in the 1700s,” Vance showed.

The Europa Clipper’s journey begins once it leaves Earth to do a flyby around Mars and return to Earth for another flyby to use the two planets’ gravity to propel itself to Jupiter’s moon.

This orbiter spacecraft should reach its destination in April 2030.

This spacecraft is about 16 feet (5 meters) in height. And how long is it? When it expands its solar arrays, it will be more than 100 feet (30.5 meters) long, about the same length as a basketball court.

The Europa Clipper will be doing 49 flybys of the moon, which can be dangerous. On each go around of Europa, the little clipper needs to spend less than a day in the dangerous radiation zone near the moon before going away.

Two to three weeks later, the spacecraft will repeat the flyby again, according to NASA.

And it is packed with a payload of instruments so these flybys are not wasted, from imagers and cameras to a thermal imaging emission system. It even has a magnetometer to confirm if Europa has an ocean and it can even measure the moon’s icy shell.

“The instrument payload is unique to Clipper and will reveal incredible detail about the surface of this mysterious moon and even insight into likely saltwater ocean contained below its icy shell,” Williams said.

Vance went into detail, stating that each flyby of the moon will allow the spacecraft’s instruments to gather enough data to help researchers understand the little ice world.

“These flybys will use cameras that see from the ultraviolet to the thermal infrared, and mass spectrometers to taste materials ejected from Europa’s surface. This information will reveal how the compositions of materials on Europa’s surface reveal what’s in its ocean and how it got there. We’ll use geophysical measurements to peer through the ice with radar, radio signals, and magnetic sensing. This will allow us to understand whether there are fluids within the ice that might provide energy for life, how thick the ice is, how deep the ocean, and how what salts are dissolved there,” he said.

He said one of the radars can penetrate the ice, which will help researchers know the average thickness of it and where the thinnest parts are. A possible follow-up mission may see a rover drilling into the ice.

“Scientists and engineers are keen to land on Europa or even drill through its ice into the ocean. Detailed studies of drill technologies have been undertaken for more than 20 years. More recently, NASA undertook a detailed study of a Europa lander concept that could search for biosignatures on Europa’s surface,” said Vance.

Williams shared a very inspiring view of the spacecraft’s mission and its potential greatness that could shape humankind.

“Europa Clipper will collect data that gives us unprecedented insight into the habitability of this ocean world. But definitive evidence for life under the ice is not something that is expected from this mission. Just as all science is conducted by standing on the shoulders of giants, Clipper is poised to be a Colossus that enables the future discovery of life beyond Earth,” she said.

Watch the launch