Could our solar system host a second celestial body capable of supporting life beyond Earth? NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft launched today from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral to find out.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the spacecraft successfully launched after the mission was delayed last week due to Hurricane Milton.

The robotic, solar-powered craft is expected to enter Jupiter’s orbit in 2030, after covering a distance of 2.9 billion kilometers on a journey that will take 5.5 years.

The Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has built for a planetary mission: it’s 30.5 meters long and 17.6 meters wide when its antennas and solar panels are fully deployed – that’s bigger than a basketball court.

It weighs about 6 tons.

Its mission is to determine whether one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, can host life.

Scientists believe that beneath the icy surface of this satellite lies an ocean of liquid water.

“Europa is one of the most promising places to look for extraterrestrial life,” said Gina DiBrazio, an official at the US space agency, at a press conference.

The mission will not look for specific signs of life, but aims to answer the burning question: Does Europa contain the ingredients that would allow life to develop? If the answer is positive, another mission will be organized to locate this life.

“It’s our chance to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago,” like the planet Mars, “but a world that might be habitable today, right now”, commented Kurt Niebar, the scientific officer of the mission, with enthusiasm.

Europa’s existence has been known since 1610. The first close-up photos of this moon were taken in 1979 by the legendary Voyager spacecraft. In them, mysterious reddish lines could be seen running across its surface. Then, in the 1990s, the Galileo spacecraft flew by, confirming the possible existence of an ocean.

This time, the Europa Clipper is equipped with several state-of-the-art instruments: cameras, spectrograph, radar, magnetometer… It will study the structure and composition of the icy surface, the depth and possibly the salinity of the ocean, and how they interact these two, for example if the water rises to the surface in places. Scientists want to know if there are on this moon the three ingredients necessary for life: water, energy and certain chemical compositions.

Bonnie Burati, the mission’s deputy science director, explained that if life exists, it will be in the ocean in the form of primitive bacteria. But at a great depth, so that the Europa Clipper cannot see it.

After reaching Europe, the Europa Clipper mission will last another four years. It will make 49 revolutions above this moon, reaching a distance of up to 25 kilometers from the surface. In each “pass” he will receive huge doses of radiation, equivalent to several million chest X-rays each time.

About 4,000 people have worked for a decade to implement the mission, the cost of which reaches 5.2 billion dollars.

This investment is justified by the importance of the data that will be collected, according to NASA. If our own solar system is home to two habitable worlds, Earth and Europa, “think about what that would mean if we extended that conclusion to the billions of other solar systems in our galaxy,” Ker Nibar said.

The Europa Clipper won’t be “out there” alone. In parallel, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Juice spacecraft will study two other Jupiter moons, Ganymede and Callisto.