SpaceX wins NASA contract to launch Jupiter satellite Europa mission Reuters

Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters)-NASA said on Friday that Elon Musk’s private rocket company SpaceX has won a $178 million launch service contract for NASA’s first mission, focusing on Jupiter. The icy satellite Europa, and whether it may have conditions suitable for life.

In a statement published online by NASA, the Europa Clippers mission will be launched in October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket owned by Musk’s company Space Exploration Technologies, which is located in NASA’s Florida. Kennedy Space Center.

The contract marks NASA’s latest vote for the Hawthorne, California-based company, which has delivered several cargo payloads and astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA in recent years.

In April, SpaceX won a $2.9 billion contract to build a lunar lander spacecraft for the planned Artemis program, which will return NASA astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.

But the contract was suspended after two rival space companies, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics Inc, protested SpaceX’s choice.

The company’s partially reusable 23-layer Falcon Heavy is currently the world’s most powerful combat space launch vehicle, putting its first commercial payload into orbit in 2019.

NASA did not disclose that other companies may bid for the Europa Clippers launch contract.

The probe will conduct a detailed survey of the ice-covered Jupiter satellite, which is a little smaller than the Earth’s moon and is a prime candidate for finding life elsewhere in the solar system.

Researchers concluded in 2018 that the curvature of Europa’s magnetic field observed by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1997 appeared to be caused by geysers gushing out of the huge underground ocean of the moon’s frozen crust. These findings support other evidence of Europa plume.

NASA said that one of the goals of the Clippers mission is to generate high-resolution images of Europa’s surface, determine its composition, look for signs of geological activity, measure the thickness of its ice crust and determine the depth and salinity of its oceans.