Europa Clipper

Mission Profile

Europa Clipper is NASA's flagship mission to study Jupiter's moon Europa, launched on 14 October 2024 aboard a Falcon 9 Block 5 and traveling toward Jupiter on a trajectory that includes Mars and Earth gravity assists before arriving in 2030. The spacecraft will conduct 49 close flybys of Europa over 3.5 years, investigating whether the moon's global subsurface ocean could support life by characterizing its ice shell thickness, ocean salinity and depth, surface geology, and atmospheric composition. Europa Clipper carries nine scientific instruments including ice-penetrating radar, a thermal imager, cameras, mass spectrometers, and a magnetometer, making it the most instrumented planetary spacecraft ever flown. If Europa's subsurface ocean is confirmed habitable, it would represent one of the most significant scientific findings in the history of planetary science.