Soon the spacecraft will reach Mars to get a push in its journey to the unknown. NASA says Clipper will make its closest approach to the red planet in four months for a gravity assist. According to the timeline, it will come within 500 to 1000 km from the Martian surface.

A NASA spacecraft has blasted off on a quest to explore Jupiter's moon Europa and reveal whether its hidden ocean might hold the keys to life.

NASA launched a spacecraft from Florida on Monday on a mission to examine whether Jupiter's moon Europa has conditions suitable to support life, with a focus on the large subsurface ocean believed to be lurking beneath its thick outer shell of ice.

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.

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.

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.

Coverage of the launch is expected to begin at 11 a.m. ET and will be added to this story in the video player above. The launch window itself is set to open at 12:06 p.m. ET.

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.