JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
NASA has just launched a mission to investigate a far-off world that's full of water.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Four, three, two, one, ignition and liftoff - Falcon Heavy with Europa Clipper.
SUMMERS: Europa Clipper is the name of the spacecraft. As the name suggests, it's going to Europa. That is a moon of Jupiter. And as NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports, this moon is made of lots of ice that covers a huge ocean.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: Scientists have been longing to get a close-up look at Europa ever since NASA's Galileo probe flew by it in the 1990s. Amanda Hendrix remembers that well. She's a researcher with the Planetary Science Institute based in Boulder, Colorado.
AMANDA HENDRIX: Those were the first good looks at the surface of Europa. And we saw all the crazy stuff going on like icebergs and the chaos terrain and this relatively young surface.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The icy surface was criss-crossed with strange, reddish brown streaks, and readings showed that beneath the ice miles down, there was water - lots of water, more than twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans. Europa's hidden ocean might seem unreachable, locked away beneath the icy crust. But Hendrix says that Europa Clipper has a suite of instruments, like ice-penetrating radar and high-resolution cameras.
HENDRIX: We'll be able to get clues about if there's actually material coming from underneath the icy surface from the ocean and getting deposited onto the surface.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: They should be able to analyze its chemical composition. Jenny Kampmeier is a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion lab. She says on Earth, we all know what water can mean.
JENNY KAMPMEIER: You know, at least on this planet, wherever there's water, we find life.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: But she says the goal of this mission isn't to detect life.
KAMPMEIER: So we're not trying to prove that there is life there now. But what we are trying to do is characterize if this could be a habitable environment.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: To do that, Europa Clipper's instruments will look for life's ingredients. The spacecraft will fly by Europa dozens of times. The closest fly-by will bring it about 16 miles above the surface. Gina DiBraccio is the acting director of NASA's Planetary Sciences Division. She says researchers now think that outside of our solar system, around other stars, ocean worlds are common.
GINA DIBRACCIO: So Clipper is going to be the first in-depth mission that will allow us to characterize habitability on what could be the most common type of inhabited world in our universe.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Scientists can't wait, but they'll have to. Jupiter and its moons are so far away, the probe won't get there until 2030. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
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