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To Europa!

NASA's Europa Clipper was launched today. It's destination is Jupiter where it will focus studying it's moon Europa to get a better idea of it's conditions and possibility of extraterrestrial life.

The project was first proposed back in 1997 while the Galileo probe confirmed there is vast oceans of liquid water under the moons icy surface. This fact sparked the interest of further studies to explore the possibility of there being suitable conditions for microbial life. But it wasn't until 2013 when the mission was finally approved.

This is quite exciting mission. Unfortunately we will still need to wait almost six years before the first results from the mission as it will take five and a half years for the probe to reach Jupiter.