A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off Monday morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a NASA probe designed to explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

With Europa Clipper now on its five-and-a-half-year, 2.2 billion-mile journey to the solar system’s largest planet, NASA has officially removed a “tremendous amount of risk from the mission,” according to Jordan Evans, Europa Clipper project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Clipper’s journey won’t be direct. It will get gravity’s help by swinging around Mars early next year, then boomerang around Earth in late 2026 before zooming in on the gas giant and its icy, dynamic moon. It is expected to arrive in 2030 and collect data for more than four years.

When the mission ends, Clipper flies itself into one of Jupiter’s rocky moons to ensure the spacecraft doesn’t contaminate Europa.

The launch was initially scheduled for October 10, but Clipper spent that day safely in SpaceX’s hangar to weather Hurricane Milton. The sky over Florida’s Space Coast was clear Monday morning with some patchy clouds.

Scientists have been calling for a Europa mission for decades, ever since NASA’s Galileo probe discovered that the moon likely has a subsurface global ocean, heated by Jupiter’s gravity that squeezes and stretches the moon’s core as it orbits the gas giant at breakneck speed turns.

With water, an energy source in the form of heat, and potentially organic compounds, scientists say Europa could be hospitable to extraterrestrial life.

While orbiting Jupiter, Clipper will fly past Europa dozens of times and use its array of scientific instruments to study the dynamics of the moon’s subsurface ocean and search for organic compounds, a potential indicator of life.

The $5 billion Europa Clipper mission was designed and built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. It is the largest planetary probe ever built by the space agency.

To launch the spacecraft, SpaceX used its Falcon Heavy rocket, a variant of their Falcon 9 with an additional booster on each side.

While SpaceX usually tries to retrieve their boosters, this time they drop them in the ocean, using up all their propellant to get the Clipper out of Earth’s gravity instead of saving some fuel to land. The fairings that protect the spacecraft as it leaves Earth will be recovered.

“The community is really fortunate to have new rockets with these heavy-lift capabilities,” said Matthew Shindell, curator of planetary science and exploration at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “If you wanted to launch a mission like this ten years ago, you wouldn’t be able to do it”