The European space mission, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer or Juice, successfully took off on board an Arianne 5 rocket from the Kourou space port in French Guiana just after noon on Friday. An earlier launch attempt was delayed by adverse weather conditions. The trip to Jupiter will take eight years.
The European Space Agency's Juice space probe blasted off Friday on a mission to discover whether Jupiter's icy moons are capable of hosting extraterrestrial life in their vast, hidden oceans.
The launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana came after a previous attempt on Thursday was called off due to the risk of lightning.
Despite cloudy skies, the rocket took off as planned at 09:14 am local time (1214 GMT), with teams on site saying it was on the correct trajectory.
A little under half an hour after lift-off, the uncrewed six-tonne spacecraft separated on schedule from the rocket at an altitude of 1,500 kilometres.
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer will take a long and winding path to the gas giant, which is 628 million kilometres from Earth.
The mission will benefit from several gravitational boosts along the way, first by doing a fly-by of Earth and the Moon, then by slingshotting around Venus in 2025 before swinging past Earth again in 2029.
'An extraordinay mission'
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer is most powerful scientific package ever transported to the outer solar system.
When it reaches its destination, in July 2031, the Airbus-built machine will carry out a detailed survey of Jupiter and three of its moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
Juice is carrying 10 scientific instruments, including an optical camera, ice-penetrating radar, spectrometer and magnetometer, which will analyse the local weather, magnetic field, gravitational pull and other elements.
It also has 85 square metres of solar panels to collect as much energy as possible near Jupiter, where sunlight is 25 times weaker than on Earth.
"This is an extraordinary mission that shows what Europe is capable of," said Philippe Baptiste, head of France's CNES space agency which manages the Guiana Space Centre.
Friday marked the second-last launch for the Ariane 5 rocket, before it is replaced by the next-generation Ariane 6.
