Spacecraft · tracked live
Europa Clipper
The largest spacecraft NASA has sent to another planet, on its way to Jupiter to make some fifty close passes over Europa - a moon with a salt-water ocean under its ice holding perhaps twice the water of every ocean on Earth. It is not looking for life, but for whether the place could support it. It arrives in 2030.
- Agency
- NASA
- Launched
- 2024-10-14 - still working
- From the Sun
- 127,033,694 km (-284,915 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 56,389,294 km (-1,116,428 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 3 min
- Travelling at
- 39.2 km/s
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Path
A cruise rather than an orbit: a long fall round the Sun shaped by a Mars flyby behind it and an Earth flyby ahead, which ends when Jupiter captures it in 2030.
Along the way
- Mars flyby, for the speed to reach Jupiter
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.