The agency on Sunday stood down from Thursday’s scheduled Europa Clipper launch due to the approaching Hurricane Milton. But crews on Friday completed one of the final steps in the prelaunch checklist, moving the spacecraft to the hangar at Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch window remains open until November 6.

“Once we have the ‘all-clear’ followed by facility assessment and any recovery actions, we will determine the next launch opportunity for this NASA flagship mission,” said Tim Dunn, senior launch director for NASA’s Launch Services Program.

Europa Clipper will fly nearly 1.8 billion miles to Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, to study whether the rocky satellite could support life. The mission will produce the first detailed investigations of the moon and is expected to enter Jovian orbit in 2030.

Scientists believe Europa may hold an ocean beneath its icy surface that contains twice as much liquid water as all oceans on Earth, despite it being about the same size as our moon. NASA will perform nearly 50 close-proximity flybys to explore its composition and geography, coming as close as within 16 miles of the surface. The goal is to produce a scan of the entire moon.

NASA selected Europa Clipper in 2017 and began building the eponymous spacecraft in 2019. With its massive solar arrays unfurled, the vehicle is about 100 feet long, about the size of a basketball court. The spacecraft’s large solar panels will power it as it cruises through a portion of space more than five times as far from the Sun as Earth.

The robotic craft will weigh nearly 13,000 pounds at launch, about half of which comes from the weight of propellant. Adding to that is an array of nine dedicated science instruments, which are shielded by a vault made of titanium and aluminum to protect against radiation. Spectrometers will produce high-resolution maps of Europa’s surface and atmosphere, and ice-penetrating radar will scan for water below the surface. Other tools will be used to locate warmer pockets of ice, for example.

Europa Clipper will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39-A at Kennedy. En route to Europa, it will perform a pair of “gravity assists,” using the pull of both Earth and Mars to propel itself further.

The spacecraft is expected to enter Jupiter’s orbit in April 2030 and perform its first flyby of Europa the following spring. Science instruments will begin collecting data in May 2031. The mission is scheduled to conclude in September 2034 when Europa Clipper smashes into Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede.

NASA will provide live prelaunch and launch coverage on its website and social media channels. Members of the public can also register to attend the launch virtually.

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Since 1973, there have been nine missions to the outer solar system, and the U.S. has had a hand in all of them. European agencies have also reached the outer planets a pair of times, but those voyages—the Ulysses and Cassini-Hudgens missions—had heavy NASA involvement.

This week, however, the European Space Agency (ESA) will finally have a deep space mission it can call its own.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) will lift off Friday and spend the next eight years on a voyage to study the gas giant and three of its water-bearing moons, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.

Originally slated to launch Thursday at 1:14pm U.K. time (8:14 a.m. EST) but postponed because of inclement weather, the spacecraft will take off from an Ariane 5 heavy-lift launcher and encircle the massive planet for several months, completing flybys of the three moons as it orbits. 

The mission will conclude with an orbital tour of Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system and the only one with its own magnetic field. No spacecraft has ever orbited a moon besides our own.

According to ESA, the goal of the mission, which is expected to reach Jupiter in July 2031, is to explore the possibility of life in the solar system beyond Earth. In particular, researchers are looking to answer five questions:

• How has Jupiter’s environment shaped its moons, and vice versa?
• How do gas giants form, and what are they like?
• Is there—or has there ever been—life in the Jupiter system?
• What makes Ganymede unique?
• And what are ocean worlds like?

Olivier Witasse, an ESA planetary scientist who has worked on JUICE since 2015, provided more details during an April 6 press briefing.

“The main goal,” he explained, “is to understand whether there are habitable environments among those icy moons and around a giant planet like Jupiter. We will characterize, in particular, the liquid water oceans which are inside the icy moons.”

Witasse said researchers will examine the location, depth, and makeup of each saltwater ocean, which only exist in liquid form deep below the surface. They’ll also look at the rotation, composition, weather conditions, and magnetic field of Jupiter’s atmosphere, to determine whether conditions are suitable for life.

To do so, they’ll rely on 10 state-of-the-art instruments aboard the launcher. They include remote sensors with spectral imaging capabilities, tools like altimeters and radar sounders to map surfaces, and a suite of equipment to measure atmospheric characteristics like magnetic fields. 

Coordinating all of them will be quite the undertaking: “We’re talking about a very large spacecraft with many key features that are striking…just after launch, there will be a lot of work to make sure that everything gets deployed properly,” said Alessandro Atzei, payload systems engineer for the mission.

In addition, JUICE will feature a powerful antenna to transmit data back to Earth, shields to protect against radiation, massive solar panels for energy collection, and a layer of insulation to shelter equipment from harsh temperatures.

To succeed, the spacecraft will also need to test out a new trick. En route to Jupiter, the spacecraft will perform what is referred to as a Lunar-Earth gravity assist, leveraging the gravity of the moon and Earth to propel it to higher speeds. Expected to take place around January 2029, it will be the world’s first attempt at such a maneuver.

As JUICE navigates the lonely vacuum of space, it’ll have at least some company. Another spacecraft, NASA’s Lucy, embarked on its 12-year sojourn to the Jupiter system in 2021, while the U.S.-backed Europa Clipper mission is slated for launch in October 2024. It too will spend several years orbiting the gas giant.

Outside of Lucy and Europa Clipper, the U.S. is eyeing several other projects. In 2024, NASA will send four astronauts to orbit the moon in the Artemis II spacecraft, while Elon Musk’s SpaceX is now an FAA approval away from an orbital launch attempt.

Mars could also be on the horizon—in June, NASA will begin an experiment where four humans spend a year inside a 3D-printed box designed to mimic conditions on the Red Planet. NASA currently has two Martian missions in development and several more under proposal.

But like all good things, the findings of JUICE and other missions will take time to arrive. Curious observers can follow along as the ESA tracks the spacecraft’s early movements by checking out this interactive tool, or by keeping an eye on the mission’s website or Twitter feed for updates.

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