American space agency NASA has started building the Europa Clipper spacecraft that will launch in 2024. The mission's purpose is to find if Jupiter's moon Europa has conditions to support life.
The Europa Clipper mission will conduct detailed reconnaissance of icy moon of Jupiter. NASA said that scientists are "almost certain" a vast ocean lies beneath Europa's icy shell.
"The mission will send a highly capable, radiation-tolerant spacecraft into a long, looping orbit around Jupiter to perform repeated close flybys of the icy moon," the space agency said on its website.
NASA said understanding Europa's habitability will help scientists better understand how life developed on Earth and the potential for finding life beyond our planet.
The Europa Clipper mission has its own Twitter handle and NASA has launched a countdown on the website, which shows that the launch will take place two years, seven months and five days from now (October 2024).
When full assembled, Europa Clipper will be as large as an SUV with solar arrays long enough to span a basketball court, NASA said.
The assembly is taking place at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. NASA said that most of the flight hardware is expected to be complete before the yearend.
About Europa Clipper mission
The main body of the spacecraft is a giant 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) propulsion module, designed and constructed by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
The nine scientific instruments that Europa Clipper will carry are: Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding (PIMS), Europa Clipper Magnetometer, Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE), Europa Imaging System (EIS), a radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface (REASON), Europa Thermal Emission Imaging System (E-THEMIS), MAss SPectrometer for Planetary Exploration/Europa (MASPEX), Europa Ultraviolet Spectrograph and a Surface Dust Analyzer (SUDA).
It will also have a 10-foot-wide (3-meter-wide) high-gain antenna.
The mission will enter Jupiter's orbit in 2030, according to NASA.
About Jupiter's moon Europa
Scientists are confident that Europa - one of the 53 moons orbiting Jupiter - harbours an internal ocean with twice the amount of water in Earth's oceans combined and may currently have conditions suitable for supporting life.
Europa is named after a woman who, in Greek mythology, was abducted by the god Zeus.
With an equatorial diameter of 1,940 miles (3,100 kilometres), Europa is about 90 per cent the size of Earth's Moon. Its surface is made of water ice and so it reflects 5.5 times the sunlight than our Moon does.
Light from the Sun takes about 45 minutes to reach Europa. Because of the distance, sunlight is about 25 times fainter at Jupiter and Europa than at Earth.
Europa orbits Jupiter every 3.5 days and is locked by the gravity of the giant planet , so the same hemisphere of the moon always faces the planet.
