Mission to moon of Jupiter will explore 'world that might be habitable'

Nasa is poised to send a spacecraft to a frosty moon of Jupiter, where extraterrestrial life may eke out an existence in an enormous ocean hidden beneath its ice-covered surface.

- Ian Sample

The Europa Clipper mission is due to blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 5.06pm UK time today after the original plan to launch last Thursday was scrapped owing to the battering winds unleashed by Hurricane Milton.

Barring any further snags, the six-ton spacecraft, the largest Nasa has ever built for a planetary mission, will fly past Mars and swing back around Earth before slingshotting out to Jupiter, covering nearly 2bn miles before reaching its destination in 2030.

While the $5bn (£3.8bn) mission will not look for life itself on the frigid Jovian moon, the probe's suite of instruments will scour Europa's surface for fingerprints of organic compounds and sniff for gases released from the moon to assess whether it is habitable.

“It's a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today, right now,” said Curt Niebur, a programme scientist on the mission.