NASA's Proposed Europa Mission May be a journey to find " Are We alone in this Universe.? "

Europa

NASA officials are pushing for the final go-ahead on a potential unmanned mission to Jupiter's moon, Europa, according to Space.

The Obama administration last month boosted NASA's 2016 budget request, which allocates $30 million out of NASA's $18.5 billion proposal to foster the beginnings of a mission to Europa.

"This is our chance," former astronaut and current NASA science chief John Grunsfeld told Space on Wednesday. "I just hope we don't miss this opportunity for lack of ideas."

The space agency's mission concept, nicknamed the "Europa Clipper," would send a space probe on a $2.1 billion journey over a distance of 390 million miles to orbit Jupiter's moon. Over the course of 3.5 years, the spacecraft would make 45 flybys of Europa at altitudes ranging from 16 to 1,700 miles above the moon's frozen surface. The probe would employ remote sensing instruments to study the surface and subsurface of Europa, including the moon's hypothetical underground ocean, which the mission concept says "may be the best place in the solar system to look for currently existing life beyond Earth." After each approach, the probe would transmit the data gathered from Europa's atmosphere back to NASA scientists on Earth.