Europa Clipper
The largest planetary spacecraft NASA has built sets out for an ocean under ice.
- When
- Known to
- ± 12 hours
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Launched 14 October 2024, Europa Clipper will reach Jupiter in 2030 and make about fifty flybys of Europa, whose subsurface ocean is thought to hold twice the water of all Earth's oceans. It carries no life-detection instrument: the mission is to establish whether the moon is habitable, not whether it is inhabited. Its solar arrays span more than 30 metres, needed at five times Earth's distance from the Sun.