Set for take-off in October and with ten years of space travel ahead of it, NASA's new Clipper spacecraft is unveiled in California. The five-billion-dollar probe will travel to Europa, one of Jupiter's dozens of moons, to search for the conditions necessary for life, including liquid water, which scientists believe to be present. The Clipper is expected to be in orbit around Jupiter and Europa in 2031, with its mission lasting until 2034.
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00:10 We are going to explore Europa.
00:25 It's an icy moon of Jupiter, about the size of our moon,
00:29 with an ocean below it, we believe, that has more water than twice of all of
00:33 Earth's oceans combined.
00:34 We're going to explore this moon to assess habitability.
00:37 Does it have an environment that could actually sustain life presently?
00:41 The mission itself essentially started in the late 1990s with studies, but
00:47 this mission was 2014 through the end of primary mission is 2034.
00:51 So that 20 year period, NASA has put aside $5 billion US for
00:56 that effort in its totality.
00:59 And right now we have about 1,000 people on it at its peak.
01:01 We had about 4,000 people across the United States and Europe working on it.
01:06 Closing the harnesses, it shows the exquisite engineering.
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01:20 Let me clarify that we're not specifically searching for
01:27 life with this mission.
01:30 We're searching for
01:32 the conditions that could allow an ocean to be habitable and
01:39 Europa to be habitable.
01:41 We're looking for water, we're looking for the right chemistry, and
01:47 we're looking for whether the conditions for energy,
01:52 the chemical energy of Europa's ocean could potentially
01:57 be right to support metabolism.
02:00 One of the fundamental questions that NASA
02:05 wants to understand is are we alone in the cosmos?
02:12 If we were to find the conditions for life and
02:14 then someday actually find life in a place like Europa,
02:19 then that would say, hey, in our own solar system,
02:23 there are two examples of life, Earth and Europa.
02:27 That would be huge for
02:29 understanding how common life might be throughout the universe.
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