NASA has selected Elon Musk-owned Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) to provide launch services for Earth’s first mission to conduct detailed investigations of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
The Europa Clipper mission will launch in October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The total contract award amount for launch services is approximately USD178 million (AED 653.26m).
Europa Clipper will conduct a detailed survey of Europa and use a sophisticated suite of science instruments to investigate whether the icy moon has conditions suitable for life. Key mission objectives are to produce high-resolution images of Europa’s surface, determine its composition, look for signs of recent or ongoing geological activity, measure the thickness of its icy shell, search for subsurface lakes, and determine the depth and salinity of Europa’s ocean.
The surface of Europa features a widely varied landscape, including ridges, bands, small rounded domes and disrupted spaces that geologists call ‘chaos terrain’.
Three newly reprocessed images, taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s, revealed details in diverse surface features on Europa. Although the data captured is more than two decades old, scientists are using modern image processing techniques to create new views of the moon’s surface in preparation for the arrival of the Europa Clipper spacecraft.
The orbiter of Jupiter will conduct dozens of flybys of Europa to learn more about the ocean beneath the moon’s thick icy crust and how it interacts with the surface. The Clipper mission will be the first return to Europa since Galileo.
NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy will manage the Europa Clipper launch service. Its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
This is the first big contract after the US Innovation and Competition Act was passed by the Senate in June this year.
The bill would pump USD250 billion into research in science and technology in the US. And an amendment to the bill allocated an extra USD10 billion to NASA’s moon-lander program and required NASA to pick a second company for the project in addition to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which won its USD2.9 billion contract in April.
Blue Origin has protested SpaceX’s selection, calling it “unfair” and filing an official complaint with the Government Accountability Office.
