Just four days after Hurricane Milton barreled through Cape Canaveral, Fla., a mission set to explore the workings of another water world blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Loosed from our world’s gravitational harbor by SpaceX’s fire-breathing Falcon Heavy rocket, NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is now sailing toward the Jupiter system.
Its target: Europa, an ice-encrusted moon that may offer the best odds humanity will ever get for finding life beyond Earth. Europa’s interior may be home to a moon-spanning, briny sea that could possess all the elements needed to craft and cradle life as we know it: energy, chemical elements and water. And Europa’s hidden ocean is thought to hold more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
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