Europa’s clipper orbiter will make about 40 to 50 close-range passes over Europa (anagram)
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Washington:
NASA said Friday that it had selected SpaceX to launch its planned flight to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, a major win for Elon Musk for setting his sights deeper into the solar system.
The Europa Clipper mission will launch in October 2024 aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with a total value of $178 million.
The mission was previously supposed to take off on a NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which suffered delays and cost overruns, with critics calling it a “works program” for Alabama where most of the development work is underway. is going.
While SLS is not yet operational, the Falcon Heavy has been deployed on commercial and government missions since its maiden flight in 2018 when it took Musk’s Tesla Roadster into space.
It generated more than five million pounds of thrust (22 million newtons) at takeoff, the equivalent of eighteen 747s.
Europa’s clipper orbiter will make about 40 to 50 passes near Europa to determine if the icy moon can harbor conditions suitable for life.
The payload will include cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images and maps of surface and atmospheric composition, as well as ice-penetrating radar to search for liquid water below.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by the NDTV crew and published from a syndicated feed.)
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