NASA announced on Friday that Elon Musk’s private rocket company SpaceX has been awarded a $178 million launch services contract for NASA’s first mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and whether it may host conditions suitable for life.
According to NASA, the Europa Clipper mission will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket owned by Musk’s business, Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
NASA’s latest vote of confidence in the Hawthorne, California-based business, which has recently carried several cargo payloads and humans to the International Space Station for NASA.
The mission will explore the ice-covered Jovian satellite, which is about the same size as Earth’s moon. It is a major candidate in the search for life elsewhere in the solar system.
Researchers concluded in 2018 that a geyser gushing through Europa’s frozen crust from a massive subsurface ocean. It created a bend in the moon’s magnetic field recorded by NASA’s Galileo satellite in 1997. Other evidence of Europa plumes was confirmed by these observations.
Producing high-resolution photographs of Europa’s surface, identified its composition, looking for signs of geologic activity, measuring the thickness of its icy shell, and determining the depth and salinity of its ocean. These are among the Clipper mission’s goals, according to NASA.
