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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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