Elon Musk’s aerospace agency SpaceX has been awarded a $178 million (£129 million) contract for NASA’s first mission to Europa, Jupiter’s fourth largest moon.
SpaceX will present ‘launch providers’ for the Europa Clipper mission, which is because of blast off in October 2024 to review Europa by a collection of fly-bys, NASA stated.
The spacecraft will launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket owned by Musk’s firm from NASA’s Kennedy Area Heart in Florida, the house company added.
The mission goals to search out out if the pure satellite tv for pc hosts situations appropriate for all times utilizing ‘a complicated suite of science devices’.
Europa, an icy moon with a hidden subsurface ocean, has a diameter of 1,940 miles (3,100 kilometres) – about 90 per cent the diameter of Earth’s moon.
The announcement comes amid an ongoing battle between SpaceX and rival firm Blue Origin, owned by fellow billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Bezos printed an open letter to NASA Administrator Invoice Nelson on Monday, providing NASA $2 billion for a contract to construct a lunar lander for the upcoming Artemis missions.
There’s proof of current geological formations inside the 15 mile thick frozen crust, together with small, darkish and dome-like options a couple of mile beneath the floor
However SpaceX – which made the announcement on its Twitter web page – has the contract for the Europa Clipper mission secure.
‘NASA has chosen Area Exploration Applied sciences Corp. (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, California, to supply launch providers for Earth’s first mission to conduct detailed investigations of Jupiter’s moon Europa,’ the company stated in a statement.
‘The full contract award quantity for launch providers is roughly $178 million.’
Key mission targets are producing high-resolution photos of Europa’s floor, decide its composition and search for indicators of current or ongoing geological exercise.
The mission will even measure the thickness of the moon’s icy shell, seek for subsurface lakes and decide the depth and salinity of Europa’s ocean.
Europa is one in every of few areas within the Photo voltaic System with liquid water, together with Earth and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, making it a goal of curiosity for NASA.
Due to ground-based telescopes, scientists already know Europa’s floor is generally water ice.
Scientists have additionally discovered proof that beneath the ice crust is an ocean of liquid water or slushy ice.
In response to NASA, Europa’s subsurface ocean may comprise greater than twice as a lot water as Earth.
Final 12 months, Monica Grady, Chancellor at Liverpool Hope College, stated it is ‘virtually a racing sure’ that Europa is dwelling to alien life, which she thinks is ‘much like the intelligence of an octopus’.
A 3D mannequin of Europa Clipper
NASA will intention to search out out if she’s right with the launch of Europa Clipper, which is able to ‘ship a extremely succesful, radiation-tolerant spacecraft into an extended, looping orbit round Jupiter to carry out repeated shut flybys of the icy moon’.
NASA didn’t reveal whether or not different firms had bid on the Europa Clipper launch contract, which marks NASA’s newest vote of confidence in Musk’s agency.
SpaceX has already carried a number of cargo payloads and astronauts to the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) for the house company in recent times.
In April, SpaceX was awarded a $2.9 billion contract to construct the lunar lander spacecraft for the deliberate Artemis program that will carry NASA astronauts again to the moon for the primary time since 1972.
However the contract was halted after two rival house firms, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and defence contractor Dynetics Inc, protested towards SpaceX’s choice.
SpaceX chief and famend billionaire Elon Musk (pictured) additionally owns automotive maker Tesla and neurotechnology agency Neuralink
Now Bezos is claiming NASA is ‘placing an finish to significant competitors for years to return’ if it does not take into account Blue Origin for contracts sooner or later.
‘It’s not too late to treatment,’ Bezos says within the letter to NASA printed on Monday (July 26).
‘We stand prepared to assist NASA average its technical dangers and resolve its budgetary constraints and put the Artemis Program again on a extra aggressive, credible, and sustainable path.’
Jeff Bezos (pictured), founding father of Amazon and house tourism firm Blue Origin, flew into house on July 20, 2021
SpaceX’s partly reusable 23-story Falcon Heavy, at the moment essentially the most highly effective operational house launch automobile on the planet, flew its first industrial payload into orbit in 2019.
In Could 2020, SpaceX efficiently transported NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley on a 19-hour journey to the ISS – marking the first crewed take a look at flight of the agency’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Within the course of it grew to become be the primary crewed launch from the US into orbit since NASA’s house shuttle program resulted in 2011.
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