LOS ANGELES: Elon Musk’s Rocket Company Spacex was awarded the $ 178 million launch service contract for the first mission of NASA focused on Europa Ice Moon Jupiter and whether it might accommodate suitable conditions for life, the space agency said on Friday.
The Europa Clipper mission is scheduled for Blastoff in October 2024 on the Falcon Heavy rocket owned by the Musk company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp, from the Kennedy NASA room center in Florida, NASA said in a statement posted online.
The contract marked the latest NASA’s voice about the confidence in the Hawthorne company, California, who had brought several cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA in the past few years.
In April, SpaceX was awarded a $ 2.9 billion contract to build a Lunar Lander spacecraft for the planned Artemis program that would bring astronaut NASA back to the moon for the first time since 1972.
But the contract was suspended after two rival space companies, Jeff Bezos Blue Origin and Dynetics Inc.
defense contractor, protesting the SPACEX selection.
Falcon Falcon 23 which can be reused in part, currently the most powerful operational room launch vehicle in the world, flying the first commercial charge to orbit in 2019.
NASA does not say what other companies might do on the Europa Clipper launch contract.
The probe is to conduct a detailed survey of Jovian satellites covered in ice, which is slightly smaller than the moon of the earth and is a leading candidate in the search for life elsewhere in the solar system.
A corner in the Europa magnetic field observed by the Galileo NASA spacecraft in 1997 appeared to be caused by the Geyser flowing through the frozen crust of the moon from a vast sea down ocean, the researchers concluded in 2018.
These findings support other evidence of Europa Plumes.
Among the objectives of the clipper mission is to produce high resolution images of the Europa surface, determine the composition, look for signs of geological activity, measure the thickness of the ice shell and determine the depth and salinity of the ocean, NASA said.