A NASA spacecraft has launched from Florida on a mission to find out if Jupiter’s icy moon Europa could support life.
The craft, called Europa Clipper, was on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket which blasted off from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral under sunny skies.
Its launch had been delayed for several days by the deadly Hurricane Milton that struck the US state last week.
The mission’s main scientific goal is to establish whether there are places below the surface of the moon that can harbour life.
Image: Pic: Reuters
Scientists are interested in the salty liquid water ocean, 40-100 miles deep, that previous observations have shown is under Europa’s thick 10-15 mile icy shell. And where there is water, there could be life.
The robotic solar-powered spacecraft, which is carrying nine scientific instruments, will travel 1.8 billion miles in a trip lasting about five and a half years and is due to enter orbit around Jupiter in 2030.
Dozens of flybys planned
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It will carry out 49 close flybys of Europa over three years, gathering detailed measurements to investigate the moon.
The probe, which is about as large as a basketball court, will fly as low as 16 miles above the surface, soaring over a different location during each flyby to scan nearly the entire moon.
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It will not look for life but will focus on the ingredients necessary to sustain life – searching for organic compounds and other clues as it uses radar to peer beneath the ice for suitable conditions.
Image: Artist’s illustration of the Europa Clipper spacecraft over the Europa moon, with Jupiter in the background. Pic: NASA/JPL-Caltech via AP
How big is the craft?
Europa Clipper, which is around 30m long and 17m wide with its antennas and solar panels – and weighs nearly six tonnes – is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission.
Its solar panels will gather sunlight for powering scientific instruments, electronics and its other subsystems in the £3.9bn mission.
The moon has been viewed as a potential habitat for life beyond Earth in our solar system.
Image: Europa Clipper is as big as a basketball court. Pic: Artist’s illustration/NASA
Main objectives
NASA said: “The mission’s three main science objectives are to understand the nature of the ice shell and the ocean beneath it, along with the moon’s composition and geology.”
“The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet,” the space agency added.
The mission’s deputy project scientist Bonnie Buratti said: “There is very strong evidence that the ingredients for life exist on Europa. But we have to go there to find out.”
The planetary scientist, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, added: “Just to emphasise: we’re not a life-detection mission. We’re just looking for the conditions for life.”
At least two people have been killed and eight others critically injured in a shooting on the campus of Brown University in Rhode Island, officials have said.
The incident is believed to be unfolding near an engineering building on the campus, according to the school’s alert system.
Providence Police and the Rhode Island State Police are responding.
It is unclear at the moment whether arrests have been made.
Brown University says no suspects are in custody and that additional shots may have been fired.
US President Donald Trump corrected an earlier post he shared online, clarifying that a suspect was not in custody. In his previous post, he had stated that a suspect was in custody.
University officials initially told students and staff that a suspect was in custody, but later said this was not the case and police were still searching for a suspect or suspects.
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Officials noted that the information remained preliminary as investigators try to determine what has occurred.
Police are actively investigating and still gathering information from the scene, said Kristy DosReis, the chief public information officer for the city of Providence.
The shooting was reported near the Barus & Holley building, a seven-storey structure that houses the School of Engineering and Physics Department, according to the school’s website.
It includes 117 laboratories, 150 offices and 15 classrooms.
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Brown is a private university with roughly 7,300 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate students.
Providence Council member John Goncalves, whose ward includes the Brown campus, said: “We’re still getting information about what’s going on, but we’re just telling people to lock their doors and to stay vigilant.
“As a Brown alum, someone who loves the Brown community and represents this area, I’m heartbroken. My heart goes out to all the family members and the folks who’ve been impacted.”
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Donald Trump has said the US “will retaliate” after three Americans were killed in a suspected Islamic State attack in Syria.
Two US service members and one civilian died and three other people were injured in an ambush on Saturday by a lone IS – also often called ISIS in Syria and Iraq – gunman, according to the he US military’s Central Command.
The attack on US troops in Syria is the first to inflict fatalities since the fall of President Bashar Assad a year ago.
“This is an ISIS attack,” the US president told reporters at the White House before leaving for the Army-Navy football game in Baltimore.
He paid condolences to the three people killed and said the three others who were wounded “seem to be doing pretty well”.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Mr Trump said “there will be very serious retaliation”.
The shooting took place near historic Palmyra, according to the state-run SANA news agency, and the casualties were taken by helicopter to the al Tanf garrison near the border with Iraq and Jordan.
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The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attacker was a member of the Syrian security force.
Syria’s Interior Ministry spokesman Nour al Din al Baba said authorities are looking into whether the gunman was an IS member or only carried its extreme ideology, and denied reports suggesting he was a security member.
Central Command earlier said in a post on X that the gunman was killed, while the identities of the service members killed wouldn’t be released until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified.
Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the civilian killed in the attack was a US interpreter.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X: “Let it be known, if you target Americans – anywhere in the world – you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.”
The US has hundreds of troops deployed in eastern Syria as part of a coalition fighting IS.
The group was defeated on the battlefield in Syria in 2019 but the UN says the group still has between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq, and its sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks.
Syria’s interim president, Ahmad al Sharaa, made a historic visit to Washington DC last month as Syria signed a political cooperation agreement with the US-led coalition against IS.
“This was an ISIS attack against the US, and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them,” Mr Trump said in his social media post, adding that Mr al Sharaa was “extremely angry and disturbed”.
National Guard troops went door-to-door on Friday to evacuate a farming city north of Seattle as severe flooding in western Washington state put levees at risk.
Days of torrential rain have swelled rivers to record or near-record levels, as flooding has stranded families on rooftops, washed over bridges and ripped homes from their foundations.
Burlington, a city of nearly 10,000 residents near Puget Sound – a large inlet of the Pacific Ocean in northwestern Washington – was placed under a full evacuation order with people told to leave immediately and move to higher ground.
The Skagit River, a major waterway that flows from the Cascade Mountains through the Skagit Valley before emptying into Puget Sound, surged to a record high of nearly 38ft (11.6m) at Mount Vernon, about 10 miles south of Burlington.
“We haven’t seen flooding like this ever,” said Karina Shagren, a spokesperson for the state’s emergency management division, adding that there had been no reports of injuries or missing individuals so far.
Image: Pic: Reuters
Image: Pic: Reuters
National Guard troops and sheriff’s deputies were going door to assist with the evacuations.
Some responders were seen paddling stranded Burlington residents to safety in inflatable river rafts through the muddy floodwaters.
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Later on Friday, the evacuation order was lifted for part of the city, Burlington police department spokesperson Michael Lumpkin said.
However, while water levels appeared to ease a little, Mr Lumpkin said “it’s definitely not an all-clear”.
The intense rainfall was driven by an atmospheric river, a massive stream of moisture drawn from the ocean and carried inland over the Pacific Northwest earlier in the week.
Although rainfall has begun to ease, the National Weather Service has issued a flash-flood warning for the Skagit River basin all the way downstream to its mouth at Puget Sound.
Image: Snohomish, around 40 miles south of Burlington, has also been affected. Pic: Reuters
Image: Pic: Reuters
The swollen waters could put enough strain on levees to cause them to fail, the weather service noted.
“Extensive flooding of streets, homes and farmland will be possible” if levees and dikes give way, it said.
The Burlington-Mount Vernon area in Skagit County continues to be the hardest-hit area, facing extensive flooding from days of heavy rainfall stretching from northern Oregon through western Washington and into British Columbia.
National Guard troops were also dispatched to deliver food and check on stranded residents in a number of communities cut off by flooding in adjacent Snohomish County, south of Skagit County.
The flooding washed out or forced the closure of dozens of roads throughout the region, including most of the Canadian highways leading to the port city of Vancouver in British Columbia.
Parts of northern Idaho and western Montana have also been impacted.