[8][9] The United States Congress issued a congressional directive on a Europa Lander, and NASA initiated a study in 2016, assessing and evaluating the concept.

[13] The Europa Lander was considered by the Planetary Science Decadal Report of 2023─2032 but rejected in favor of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe and Enceladus Orbilander.

[15][3][16] The lander was described as a logical follow-up to the Galileo orbiter and probe mission in the 1990s, for which a major result was the discovery of a large sub-surface ocean that may offer habitable aquatic conditions.

[18] Various ecosystems exist on Earth without any access to sunlight relying instead on hydrothermal vents or other sources of chemicals suitable to energy production by extremophiles[19] (see chemosynthesis).

This water layer below the ice may be in contact with the moon's interior allowing ready access to hydrothermal energy and chemistry.

[20] In 18 July 2017, the House Space Subcommittee held hearings on the Europa Clipper as a scheduled large strategic science mission and to discuss this lander as a possible follow up.

[21] The president's 2018 and 2019 federal budget proposals do not fund the Europa Lander, but they did assign US$195 million[22] for concept studies[23][24] and research on the required science instruments.

[26] The lander mission would have three main science objectives:[27] The key phases of the flight are: launch, cruise, de-orbit, descent and landing.

[1] In preparation to its landing, the Carrier Stage would be discarded, leaving the spacecraft stack in a configuration called Deorbit Vehicle (DOV) that would decelerate and initiate the descent.

[1] The lander would feature a robotic arm with 5 degrees of freedom, that would enable it to dig out several shallow sub-surface samples at a maximum depth of 10 cm (3.9 in) and deliver them to its onboard laboratory.

[35] A study published in October 2018 suggests that most of Europa's surface may be covered with closely spaced ice spikes, called penitents, as tall as 15 meters (50 ft).

[37] This supports the need to first perform high-definition reconnaissance with the ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) and Europa Clipper, launching in 2023 and 2024 respectively, before planning a lander mission.

Planetary protection guidelines require that inadvertent contamination of a Europan ocean by terrestrial organisms must be avoided, to a probability level of less than 1 in 10,000.

[46] The Clipper orbiter will provide reconnaissance data to characterize the radiation environment and help determine a landing location.