Can life exist on a far-flung moon of Jupiter?

NASA is trying to find out.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale.

This October, NASA will launch a spacecraft as part of a deep space mission to one of Jupiter's moons, Europa, all to determine if it's capable of supporting life.

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California have been building the Europa

Clipper for the last several years.

Our team got to visit before it's shipped off to Cape Canaveral later this month. In order to

successfully make its 1.8 billion mile voyage to Europa, the spacecraft comes

equipped with massive solar power arrays, heavy radiation shielding, and a thin metal plate.

And printed on that plate, 140 waveforms of one word.

Water. Water there in English, Spanish, German, Japanese and Cherokee,

respectively. Because finding water is the key to this.

NASA is confident there is an entire saltwater ocean underneath Europa's icy surface

that could support life.

We spoke to Cynthia Phillips, project staff scientists at

JPL, about why they're so sure. It's a detective story. So the Galileo

spacecraft visited the Jupiter system back in the 1990s.

So even before Galileo got there, we knew that the surface of Europa, just from compositional

measurements made by telescopes even, we knew that it was made out of ice, water ice.

And so people kind of theorize that maybe there could be an ocean under it.

But it wasn't until Galileo got there and it observed Europa with its instruments that we kind of built up a series

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