Nasa launched a spacecraft from Florida on Monday on a mission to examine whether Jupiter’s moon Europa has conditions suitable to support life, with a focus on the large subsurface ocean believed to be lurking beneath its thick outer shell of ice.
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It is the largest spacecraft Nasa has built for a planetary mission, at about 100ft (30.5 metres) long and about 58ft wide with its antennas and solar arrays fully deployed – bigger than a basketball court – while weighing around 13,000lbs (6,000kg).
Even though Europa, the fourth-largest of Jupiter’s 95 officially recognised moons, is just a quarter of Earth’s diameter, its vast global ocean of salty liquid water may contain twice the water in Earth’s oceans. Earth’s oceans are thought to have been the birthplace for life on our planet.
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Europa, whose diameter of roughly 1,940 miles (3,100km) is around 90 per cent that of our moon, has been viewed as a potential habitat for life beyond Earth in our solar system. Its icy shell is believed to be 10-15 miles thick, sitting atop an ocean 40-100 miles deep.