Mission

A masterful, genre-defying narrative of the most ambitious science project ever conceived: NASA''s deep-space mission to Europa--the Jovian moon where might swim the first known alien life in our solar system--powered by a motley team of obsessives and eccentrics. When scientists discovered the first ocean beyond Earth, they had two big questions: "Is it habitable? " and "How do we get there?

" To answer the first, they had to answer the second, and so began a vivacious team''s twenty-year odyssey to mount a mission to Europa, the ocean moon of Jupiter. Standing in their way: NASA, fanatically consumed with landing robots on Mars; the White House, which never saw a science budget it couldn''t cut; Congress, fixated on going to the moon or Mars--anywhere, really, to give astronauts something to do; rivals in academia, who wanted instead to go to Saturn; and even Jupiter itself, which guards Europa in a pulsing, rippling, radiation belt--a halo of death whose conditions are like those that follow a detonated ther.