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Europa Clipper has launched to solve an alien mystery

The spacecraft has embarked on a trek to see just how habitable Europa might be

An illustration of the Europa Clipper spacecraft in front of the moon Europa, which is pale with red stripes crisscrossing the surface. Jupiter peeks out from behind Europa.

The Europa Clipper spacecraft (illustrated) will eventually repeatedly soar over the cracked surface of icy Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Clipper will be the biggest planetary spacecraft NASA has ever launched.

JPL-Caltech/NASA

By Lisa Grossman

Updated

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is on its way to help solve a quarter-century-old mystery: Could anything live in the ocean that lurks beneath the icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa?

“This is a mission we’ve been dreaming of for 25 years now, since I was in graduate school,” says planetary geologist Cynthia Phillips of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.