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

With the Europa Clipper now on its 1.8-billion mile, 5½-year journey to the solar system’s largest planet, NASA has officially retired a “tremendous amount of risk on the mission,” according to Jordan Evans, Europa Clipper project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

The flight’s initial stages went according to their carefully choreographed plan.

The spacecraft lifted off at 9:06 a.m. Pacific time, and the side boosters that helped fuel its fiery ascent broke away from the rocket a little more than three minutes into the flight. The main booster shut down and fell back to Earth about a minute later.

The fairing that secured Clipper at the top of the rocket separated about 4½ minutes into the flight.

After an initial eight-minute burn, the spacecraft entered a “coasting orbit” around Earth. A second, shorter engine burn positioned Clipper on a trajectory to exit Earth’s embrace.

Teams at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge applauded when the spacecraft separated from the rocket a little more than an hour after the launch. With its twin solar panels still folded up tight, the probe resembled a cube.

“Please say goodbye to Clipper on its way to Europa,” said Pranay Mishra, the mission’s flight director at JPL.

A second round of cheers erupted about five minutes later, when direct communication with the spacecraft was confirmed.

Mission managers noted signs that the propulsion system failed to vent, but the craft rolled into its desired position. That was seen as evidence that the propulsion system is working fine.

Clipper’s journey to Europa will not be direct. It will get a gravity assist by sling-shotting around Mars early next year, then boomerang back around Earth in late 2026 before zooming toward Jupiter and the gas giant‘s icy, dynamic moon.

The probe is scheduled to arrive in 2030 and gather data for more than four years.

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

The launch was initially scheduled for Thursday, but Clipper spent that day secured in SpaceX’s hangar to ride out Hurricane Milton. The skies over Florida’s space coast were clear with few wispy clouds Monday morning.

Scientists have advocated for a Europa mission for decades, ever since NASA’s Galileo probe found that the moon likely has a subterranean global ocean, heated by Jupiter’s gravitational forces compressing and stretching the moon’s core as it orbits the gas giant at break-neck speed.

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

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

The $5-billion Europa Clipper mission was designed and built by JPL . It’s the largest planetary probe ever built by NASA .

To launch the spacecraft, SpaceX employed its Falcon Heavy rocket, a variant of its Falcon 9 with an extra booster strapped to each side.

While SpaceX usually attempts to recover its boosters, this time, it let them fall into the ocean — expending all of their propellant on getting 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 available to them,” said Matthew Shindell, planetary science and exploration curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “If you were trying to launch a mission like this a decade ago, you couldn’t do it.”

The nation’s COVID-19 vaccination effort is failing. Last year, only 22% of adults received the latest COVID booster, which is less than half the rate of vaccination for the flu — even though COVID is twice as deadly.

Amid growing concern about the effects of long COVID and ahead of a likely surge in infections this winter by an even more contagious variant, we need more effective public health messages to encourage immunization.

Much has been made of COVID’s consequences for overall health, productivity and the economy. But recent research suggests a compelling new basis for vaccine advocacy: COVID’s capacity to reduce intelligence.

Using data from more than 100,000 people who completed online tests in England, the authors of a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that those recovering from COVID, including those with only mild symptoms, had measurable cognitive deficits. Even participants who had “mild COVID-19 with resolved symptoms” exhibited deficits “commensurate with a 3-point loss in IQ” compared with uninfected participants.

The cognitive loss was more pronounced in those who experienced more severe infections. Participants who had long COVID — that is, with symptoms that lasted more than 12 weeks — had the equivalent of a 6-point IQ loss on average, and those who had been “admitted to the intensive care unit had the equivalent of a 9-point loss.”

The study’s results, which are buttressed by those of an earlier observational study in Norway, are not widely known. Yes, many people know that COVID infections might lead to short-term “brain fog,” but these studies raise the prospect of cognitive deficits that can last for years. This suggests yet another reason to get the vaccine: It may protect your intellect.

Many people regard their ability to reason as a core aspect of their identity; that’s one reason the prospect of dementia is so frightening. This research suggests that getting your booster may be one way to preserve that ability and promote brain health. If you want to keep solving Wordle or the Saturday crossword, you have an additional reason to get boosted.

This message is especially important for younger populations who perceive themselves as being at lower risk. These findings underscore the point that COVID-19 is not just another flu; its potential to cause lasting cognitive impairment is too significant to ignore. Young people, whose more active social lives often drive the spread of COVID, can safeguard not just their health but also their intelligence and their futures by getting vaccinated.

Many young people accept the risk of infection based on their robust physical health but underestimate the virus’ potential to cause long-term neurological damage. The fact that even mild cases of COVID can lead to such significant harm could help challenge the prevailing complacency about vaccination.

Public health messages about vaccination have often focused on helping others, particularly the elderly. And it does:A study published by the Lancet last year found that every 150 people who got boosted prevented one emergency room visit for COVID. But while it’s good to do something for others, research suggests that self-interest is a stronger motivator — especially since the jabs are often accompanied by short-term aches, fever and other symptoms as our immune systems ramp up in response. Such downsides seem like a small price to pay for the precious benefit of preserving intelligence.

We should emphasize the cognitive health consequences not to promote fear of the disease but to foster an informed understanding of it. There is still much that we don’t know about COVID’s long-term consequences for cognitive function and whether they will persist as new variants emerge. But we know enough to urge the public to think about not just surviving the virus but also thriving after they recover.

We are now armed with data that underscore unforeseen risks of the virus that should be especially alarming to younger people who put great store in their mental acuity. That should motivate more of us to bolster our communal defenses against this formidable disease.

It’s smart to be fully vaccinated, of course: That’s why more than 95% of a group that knows COVID better than most — physicians — get their shots. But vaccination can also help keep you smart. We should all bear this in mind when we decide whether to get our COVID boosters this fall.

Ian Ayres is a professor at Yale Law School. Lisa Sanders is a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and the director of Yale’s Multidisciplinary Long Covid Care Center.