It won't land, but the robotic spacecraft will fly as close as 16 miles to the moon's frozen surface to probe oceans of liquid water beneath.

Managed by JPL scientists and technicians, it will take Europa Clipper 5 1/2 years to reach Jupiter, where it will slip into orbit around the giant gas planet.

NASA's Europa Clipper, the largest spacecraft ever built for an interplanetary mission, has launched from Kennedy Space Center on a mission to explore Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Europa Clipper will travel 1.

NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on a nearly six-year mission to Jupiter to see if it's possible to sustain life that far into space.

A massive NASA spacecraft has set sail for Jupiter and its moon Europa. The craft named Europa Clipper will peer beneath the moon's icy crust and determine whether conditions there could support life.

It's attached to a spacecraft called the Europa Clipper, NASA's solar-winged, silvery probe built to study the intricacies of a Jovian moon that could have harbored life long ago, per scientists' calculations.

The Europa Clipper spacecraft will fly to the smallest of the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter, Europa. It is expected to arrive at its destination by 2030. When it does, it will have flown 1.8 billion miles (2.

The spacecraft will be NASA's first dedicated to studying a distant ice-covered moon in our solar system to determine whether it could be habitable for life.