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 Centre in Florida.
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, according to CNN.
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’s large solar arrays, which will help power the spacecraft on its journey, deployed three hours after launch.
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.