FLORIDA – A mission to study one of the solar system’s most promising environments that may be suitable for life has lifted off. NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft — designed to explore its namesake, Jupiter’s moon Europa — launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket Monday at 12:06 p.m. ET from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The event streamed live on NASA’s website. The long-anticipated liftoff, initially scheduled for October 10, was delayed by Hurricane Milton. But crews onsite at the center evaluated launch facilities after the storm and cleared the spacecraft to return to the launchpad.

Now, the spacecraft has successfully entered orbit and NASA confirmed they received a signal from Europa Clipper about an hour and 10 minutes after launch, which means that mission control is communicating with the spacecraft and receiving data.

Europa Clipper will serve as NASA’s first spacecraft dedicated to studying an ice-covered ocean world in our solar system, and it aims to determine whether the moon could be habitable for life as we know it.

Clipper will carry nine instruments and a gravity experiment to investigate the ocean beneath Europa’s thick ice shell. The moon’s ocean is estimated to contain twice as much liquid water as Earth’s oceans.

“The instruments work together hand in hand to answer our most pressing questions about Europa,” said Robert Pappalardo, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. “We will learn what makes Europa tick, from its core and rocky interior to its ocean and ice shell to its very thin atmosphere and the surrounding space environment.” The spacecraft also carries more than 2.6 million names, submitted by people from countries around the world and a poem by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The $5.2 billion mission began as a concept in 2013, but the road to launch hasn’t been without challenges.

In May, engineers discovered that components of the spacecraft may not be able to withstand Jupiter’s harsh radiation environment. However, the team was able to complete necessary testing in time and get approval in September to proceed toward launch, preventing a 13-month delay of the launch with no changes to the mission plan, goals or trajectory. (CNN)…[+]