NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, designed to probe for habitable environments beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, is on its way to the outer Solar System.
After a textbook launch at 12:06:00 PM, local time, into beautiful blue skies above NASA’s Kennedy Spaceflight Center (KFC), Cape Canaveral, Florida, it rocketed through Earth orbit and continued to accelerate until, 62minutes later, it separated from the final stage of its SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. Two-and-a-half hours after that, it is expected to unfurl its gigantic solar panels (14.2 meters on each side) and begin its 5½-year journey to Jupiter.
It wasn’t the smoothest operation NASA has ever seen. Until last month, there were concerns that vital components of the spacecraft’s electronics might not be able to withstand the radiation in Jupiter’s intense magnetic belts, through which it must repeatedly dive in order to conduct its mission.
Then, Hurricane Milton, one of most intense tropical cyclones ever to hit Florida, drew a bead on Cape Canaveral, hours before the initially scheduled 10 October launch.
Luckily, there were plenty of opportunities to reschedule, because launch windows extended all the way to 6 November, and the spacecraft could be safely parked in a hangar built to withstand hurricanes. “The SpaceX and NASA teams did a great job of keeping the hardware safe during the hurricane,” says NASA Associate Administrator James Free.
Equally fortunately, KFC took no major damage, though it did require a couple days for engineers to make sure everything was OK—including bridges over which the spacecraft and its launch vehicle had to be wheeled, en route to the launch pad.
Meanwhile, SpaceX engineers used the down time to pore over past flight data and other records from other launches, in what Julianna Scheiman, director of the company’s NASA science missions, called a “paranoia scrub”—a valuable practice, she says, because “one of the most important rules in rocketry is to stay paranoid and stay hungry.”
During the process, she says, they discovered a quality-control issue regarding tubing in the launch vehicle—a potential worry because “there’s tubing all over, in different parts of the rocket.”
Ultimately, there proved to be no reason for concern, but it’s another reason why the post-Milton launch date was variously set as maybe 11 October, then maybe 12 October, maybe 13 October, and finally, 14 October.
Additional paranoia came in the final hours preceding the launch.
Space launches, especially those heading for other planets, need to be very precisely timed, lest they miss their destinations. “They call it rocket science for a reason,” Scheiman jokes.
In the case of Europa Clipper, the launch team had precisely 15 seconds of leeway: the spacecraft had to launch sometime between 12:05:45 and 12:06:00. Other launches have even tighter windows, Scheiman says, but a larger window was desired for this one because of the need for what she calls “COLA.”
In NASA-speak, COLA is Collision on Launch Avoidance. Tim Dunn, the agency’s senior launch director at KFC, calls it a standard process designed to make sure the launch doesn’t collide with anything currently passing overhead.
Not that Europa Clipper was going into orbit with other satellites, but it was passing through low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, and geosynchronous Earth orbit, all of which have a kaleidoscope of satellites—some operational, some not—that it would be unfortunate to hit.
“We have friends over in the Space Force that do space surveillance constantly, and are cataloging every object,” Dunn says. Based on that, he says, certain parts of a launch window—generally only a second or two long, can be deemed too risky as the launch window nears. “It’s just another technique we use to ensure mission success,” he says.
The Europa Clipper journey
Next up for the spacecraft are flybys of Mars, early next March, then of Earth, late in 2026. Both will give it gravitational boosts it needs to reach Jupiter in April 2030. There, it will brake into orbit, then use gravitational assists from Europa and Jupiter’s other moons to conduct 49 flybys of Europa, long believed to have a potentially life-bearing subsurface ocean. In the process, it will dip as close as 25 kilometers to the surface in an effort not only to study it in detail, but to snag samples of water jetting into space from Europa’s sub-surface ocean.
Not that its instruments are in any way Star-Trek-style life detectors. They wouldn’t recognize an alien microbe even they chanced to snag one. Rather, the goal is simply to determine if Europa has conditions suitable for life as we know it.
“Europa could have all the ingredients for life as we know it,” Free says. “Water, organics, chemical energy, and stability. What we discover at Europa will have profound implications for the study of astrobiology and how we view our place in the Universe.”
