The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer has blasted off on an eight-year voyage from a spaceport in French Guiana. The European Space Agency's mission to Jupiter will survey three moons that might have once hosted life. Europa, Callisto and Ganymede are frigid, ice-covered Jovian satellites three-quarters of a billion kilometres from the sun, but they have vast liquid water oceans beneath their surfaces. If hydrothermal vents – found on ocean floors all over Earth – exist, they may provide enough warmth for life to thrive in the darkness

Juice mission blasts off to Jupiter to assess lunar habitability