By Mary O’KEEFE

On Oct. 14 Europa Clipper mission launched, beginning its long mission to Jupiter’s moon. Its main science goal is to determine whether there are places below the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa that could support life. The mission is a “Water is Life” kind of thing.

Now one of the big stories this week was how SpaceX launched its Starship rocket and then caught with mechanical arms a few minutes later the booster back at the launch pad. I think most of us remember seeing spaceships launch; the boosters would separate and fall away then be captured at sea; however, what SpaceX did – well, this is “Buck Rogers” type of science fiction that is now science fact. And this was a really big deal with regard to future flights.

But I want to highlight the Europa Clipper mission that launched the next day. Maybe we are used to seeing launches and SpaceX catching the booster was a great visual; however, I want to highlight the Europa mission because it is such an important mission that has been in the works for years.

The mission was developed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) along with Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland.

I have covered JPL for a very long time and Europa has been a subject of conversation at almost every gathering. Sometimes it was an all out, “We need to go there” and sometimes it was just an add-on to another space conversation, like “Europa is where we have to look.”

While some looked at the Earth’s moon as the next adventure, I looked at Jupiter’s moon Europa.

It all started when astronomer Galileo Galilei first found Europa through a homemade telescope in 1610.

“He observed bright dots surrounding the planet Jupiter, assuming they were distant stars. When Galileo realized the dots were dancing around Jupiter over several nights, he concluded that they were actually four moons orbiting the giant planet. The discovery upended the dominant idea at the time that Earth was the center of the universe. In fact, most celestial objects weren’t in orbit around Earth at all,” according to jpl.nasa.gov.

The way scientists and engineers at JPL spoke about this mission (before it was even a mission) continued that “upending” effect, that is a new discovery.

Why has this moon captured the imagination of space explorers for centuries? An explanation can be found on jpl.nasa.gov: Scientists believe that some worlds, beyond Earth, hosted life billions of years ago. The ingredients for life are water, chemistry and energy and that could exist on Europa. Previous missions to Jupiter and its moons have shown strong evidence of an ocean beneath the moon’s thick icy crust. This moon may be home to organic compounds that are the essential chemical building blocks for life. And if the Europa Clipper mission determines that Europa is habitable, it would mean there might be more habitable worlds in our solar system.

So once again Jupiter’s moon Europa could change the way we think about our solar system.

Europa Clipper is a big spacecraft. When its solar arrays are deployed it spans more than 100 feet. The spacecraft has 24 engines and nine dedicated science instruments, plus gravity/radio science instruments.

According to jpl.nasa.gov, the three main scientific objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition and to characterize its geology.

A clipper was a type of mid-19th-century merchant sailing vessel. It is that ship with full sails that we see in so many old paintings. It carries with it the romance of discovery and the freedom of the open seas, which is why the Europa’s Clipper name is so appropriate.

And Europa Clipper is taking along with it names of earthlings and a poem.

The “Message in a Bottle” campaign was launched long before the actual mission launched. People sent in their names to be placed on the spacecraft. Once all the names were gathered, “Technicians in the Micro-devices Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will use an electron beam to stencil them onto a dime-size silicon microchip. Each line of text is smaller than 1/1000 the width of a human hair,” according to europa.nasa.gov.

Names of those who participated in the campaign, along with a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, will be traveling to Europa as part of the mission.

I think I am so fascinated by Europa Clipper because at its core it is not about space conquer and control – it is a return to true space exploration.

We are definitely looking like fall the next few days. Today we should expect drizzle before 11 a.m. and then a 20% to 30% chance of rain through tonight. We should also have some Santa Ana conditions today and Friday. Temperatures will be in the low 70s on Friday; on Saturday and Sunday we’ll see temperatures in the mid-to-high 70s, then even warmer Monday and Tuesday with highs in the low 80s.