NASA has invested $5 billion in this probe to find aliens

© NASA

NASA has just launched a very ambitious mission with the takeoff of its Europa Clipper probe. As its name suggests, its final destination will be Jupiter's moon “Europe”. Having left Earth yesterday evening aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the 6-ton heavy probe has just begun a journey of nearly 10 years.

It will begin its journey with a flyby of Mars (in 2025) and Earth (in 2026). These two passages will allow it to take advantage of gravity to gain speed. The probe will then reach Jupiter around spring 2030. This approach, which will take it more than 2 billion kilometers, will allow it to save a large quantity of fuel for the rest of the mission and the flybys of Europe.

Relive the launch in the live conditions of this very special mission.

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An extraordinary mission

If Europa Clipper shakes that much The news is because the probe raises many hopes. In the 90s, its big sister Galileo flew over Jupiter and its moons. It then discovered traces of an ocean of #8217;liquid water beneath Europa's icy surface.

Since then, NASA has tried three times to launch a mission to this distant destination, but the costs of such a program have always cooled the agency's accountants. It is finally, 35 years after the takeoff of Galileo (almost to the day) that the Europa Clipper mission will take over.

In Search of Aliens

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If Europa Clipper took so long to see the light of day, it is because the stakes are enormous. Financially first. The construction of the probe and its 352 kg of scientific equipment cost the American taxpayer a trifle of 16 billion dollars.

Scientifically second. Europa Clipper is one of its missions that could change our vision of the Universe. In a few years, during its flyby of Europe, it could discover traces of extraterrestrial life there. NASA hopes so without daring to say so.

Jupiter's moon is in any case one of the best candidates we have. Like the Earth, it has an ocean of liquid water. Now we know that it is these same oceans that brought life to our planet. Once this first condition is met, Europa has other solid arguments.

No results before 2035?

Jupiter's moon Europa as seen by NASA's Juno spacecraft © NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS with image processing by Kevin M. Gill

In all, Europa Clipper must make about fifty passages around Europa. They will allow us to better understand the composition of the moon's subglacial ocean (its very existence, of course) that very likely, remains to be proven). The probe is also to analyze geological changes on Europa.

They must be “gentle” enough to allow time for a complex life form to develop. Finally, and this is the biggest unknown to date, Europa Clipper must find traces of organic molecules essential to the development of life on Europa.

All this information will be collected between 2031 and 2034. They will arrive on Earth shortly thereafter and will be analyzed by NASA scientists. More specifically, it is the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) that must take care of this analysis.

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