Supersized spacecraft When its solar wings and antennas are unfurled, Clipper is about the size of a basketball court - more than 100 feet (30 meters) end to end - and weighs nearly 13,000 pounds ...

Once the Europa Clipper takes off, ahead of the uncrewed spacecraft is a six-year journey to the Jupiter moon Europa, where the massive orbiter will get an unprecedented glimpse of an ocean world ...

and NASA is going to send a new spacecraft to check it out. The mission, called Europa Clipper, will see a spacecraft sent to Europa and remain in orbit around the moon for several years.

While these instruments and Europa Clipper overall were designed to be the first instruments and spacecraft to definitively detect whether or not Europa was ejecting plumes into space, the ...

Europa Clipper's flyby of Mars on March 1 will bring ... Credit: NASA During its approach, the 12,750-pound spacecraft will be traveling at roughly 15.2 miles per second. Counterintuitively ...

but more detailed design analysis began last year when the SLS option of flying the Europa Clipper spacecraft was moved back to the Block 1 vehicle as a part of Fiscal Year 2018 appropriations.

"To detect a plume for certain, we’ll have to return to the Jupiter system, and NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, currently in development, will do just that," Phillips said. "If plumes do ...

SpaceX started Clipper on its 1.8 billion-mile (3 billion-kilometer) journey, launching the spacecraft on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Florida's Kennedy Space Center.