NASA is moving ahead with its mission to determine whether Jupiter’s moon, Europa, can support biology, a plan decades in the making, reports NBC News.
Europa is thought to hold a 105-mile deep body of water below its icy shell, conditions that could be right for biology.
The space agency confirmed its $4.25 billion mission Tuesday, and said it was aiming for a 2023 launch.
"We are all excited about the decision that moves the Europa Clipper mission one key step closer to unlocking the mysteries of this ocean world," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the science mission directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.
Scientists at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in June discovered sodium chloride on Europa, a breakthrough that suggests the salty subsurface of the moon may chemically resemble Earth’s oceans.
The Europa Clipper, a van-sized robotic spacecraft, will be built and tested primarily at NASA’s Pasadena lab. The journey will take three years, and the Clipper with make repeated close flybys of the moon to reduce its exposure to the energetic particles trapped by Jupiter’s magnetic field, per the BBC.
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