The Europa Clipper mission is due for blastoff in October
2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket owned by Musk's company, Space Exploration
Technologies Corp, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA said in a
statement posted online.
The contract marked NASA's latest vote of confidence in the
Hawthorne, California-based company, which has carried several cargo payloads
and astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA in recent years.
In April, SpaceX was awarded a $2.9 billion contract to
build the lunar lander spacecraft for the planned Artemis program that would
carry NASA astronauts back to the moon for the first time since 1972.
But that contract was suspended after two rival space
companies, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics Inc,
protested against the SpaceX selection.
The company's partly reusable 23-story Falcon Heavy,
currently the most powerful operational space launch vehicle in the world, flew
its first commercial payload into orbit in 2019.
NASA did not say what other companies may have bid on the
Europa Clipper launch contract.
The probe is to conduct a detailed survey of the ice-covered
Jovian satellite, which is a bit smaller than Earth's moon and is a leading
candidate in the search for life elsewhere in the solar system.
A bend in Europa's magnetic field observed by NASA's Galileo
spacecraft in 1997 appeared to have been caused by a geyser gushing through the
moon's frozen crust from a vast subsurface ocean, researchers concluded in
2018. Those findings supported other evidence of Europa plumes.
Among the Clipper mission's objectives are to produce
high-resolution images of Europa's surface, determine its composition, look for
signs of geologic activity, measure the thickness of its icy shell and
determine the depth and salinity of its ocean, NASA said. -Reuters
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