Elon Musk’s private
rocket company SpaceX has been awarded a $178 million NASA contract to provide
launch services for a mission to investigate Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

NASA announced the $178
million contract award on Friday.  

The mission will take
place on a Falcon Heavy Rocket. It will use specialised equipment to determine
if Jupiter’s icy moon can sustain life.

According to NASA, the
key objectives of the mission are: produce high-resolution images of Europa’s
surface, determine its composition, look for signs of recent or ongoing geological
activity, measure the thickness of moon’s icy shell, search for subsurface
lakes, and determine the depth and salinity of Europa’s Ocean.

The mission will
follow-up on the observations of NASA’s Galileo aircraft in 1997 which found a
bend in Europa’s magnetic field.

The bend 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.

The mission is
scheduled for October 2024 and will take off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s
Kennedy Space Center in Capa Canaveral.

SpaceX and NASA have
been working together on multiple space missions since 2019 taking cargo and
astronauts up to the international space station.

Of late, SpaceX’s
Dragon spacecraft took sea creatures to space.

The contract marked
NASA’s vote of confidence in SpaceX. In April 2009, SpaceX was awarded $2.9
billion contract to build lunar lander spacecraft for the Artemis program. The
spacecraft would take NASA astronauts back to the moon for the first time since
1972.

However, this contract
had to be suspended after Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and defense contractor
Dynetics Inc, protested against the selection of SpaceX.

NASA did not say what
other companies bid on the Europa contract.