Europa Clipper, NASA’s Mission to Jupiter’s Oceanic Moon, Is ‘Go’ for Launch

Europa Clipper, NASA’s Mission to Jupiter’s Oceanic Moon, Is ‘Go’ for Launch

By Michael Greshko & Nature journal

After many years of dreaming of Jupiter’s moon Europa — and the huge ocean that most likely lies beneath its icy floor — scientists are actually weeks away from sending a spacecraft there. NASA confirmed yesterday that its Europa Clipper mission will launch on schedule, following a scare that it may need to be considerably delayed owing to probably defective transistors put in on the US$5-billion spacecraft.

“We are confident that our beautiful spacecraft and capable team are ready for launch operations and our full science mission at Europa,” Laurie Leshin, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, stated at a 9 September press convention.

With a mass of greater than 3.2 tonnes, a top of roughly 5 metres, and a width of greater than 30 metres with its photo voltaic panels totally unfurled, Europa Clipper is the most important spacecraft that NASA has ever constructed for a planetary mission. Yesterday, the mission handed what’s identified in NASA parlance as ‘key decision point E’ — the ultimate evaluate hurdle that must be cleared earlier than continuing in direction of launch. The spacecraft’s launch window opens on 10 October.

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If it takes off efficiently subsequent month, the orbiter will arrive at Jupiter in April 2030. Its 9 devices will then examine each Europa’s icy crust and the ocean that scientists suspect lies beneath it, to find out whether or not the moon may assist life as we all know it. Earlier missions have urged that Europa’s icy floor hides a subterranean ocean of brine with greater than twice the quantity of water in Earth’s oceans. The moon’s fissured, seemingly younger floor additionally implies that the satellite tv for pc has energetic geology — hinting that Europa’s inside may very well be heat and dynamic sufficient for the advanced chemistry of life.

There’s no such factor as a tricorder — a fictional instrument from the Star Trek universe — that we will purpose at one thing to disclose whether or not it’s alive, stated Curt Niebur, the Europa Clipper programme scientist at NASA’s headquarters in Washington DC, through the press convention. “It is extremely difficult to be able to detect life, especially from orbit,” he stated. “First, we’re going to ask the straightforward question: Are the proper ingredients there for life to exist?”

Uneven waters en path to an ocean world

Earlier than the transistor scare, Europa Clipper had endured its share of setbacks. In 2019, NASA angered scientists by reducing a complicated magnetometer from the spacecraft, citing finances considerations. The mission additionally endured uncertainty for years over how it will get to house. That’s as a result of the US Congress had lengthy mandated that the spacecraft fly aboard NASA’s long-delayed House Launch System rocket. Lastly, in 2020, US lawmakers allowed the programme to pick the dependable Falcon Heavy rocket from non-public agency SpaceX in Brownsville, Texas, for the launch.

The attainable transistor drawback reared its head in Might this yr when NASA engineers learnt that batches of a sure type of transistor already put in on the Europa Clipper spacecraft had been misbehaving. The elements, referred to as MOSFETS (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors), act like switches in electrical circuits. They got here from a NASA provider, the corporate Infineon, based mostly in Neubiberg, Germany.

As a result of Europa Clipper is ready to fly previous Europa 49 occasions, at distances as shut as 25 kilometres, the spacecraft can even must fly by means of a fusillade of charged particles accelerated by Jupiter’s magnetic subject, which is roughly 20,000 occasions as sturdy as Earth’s. Which means the electronics housed within the orbiter should resist radiation harm.

However in Might NASA stated it was analyzing whether or not the mission’s transistors risked malfunctioning. The company launched into 4 months of 24-hour intensive testing at three completely different amenities: JPL; the Johns Hopkins Utilized Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland; and the NASA Goddard House Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This was a huge lift, and I think ‘huge lift’ is a huge understatement,” Leshin stated.

After evaluating spare MOSFETs from the identical batches that had been put in on Europa Clipper, NASA discovered that the spacecraft’s circuits would carry out as anticipated. This conclusion partially rests on the truth that through the first half of its four-year baseline mission orbiting Jupiter, the spacecraft might be within the worst of Jupiter’s radiation just one out of each 21 days. The remainder of the time, the orbiter’s transistors can partially self-heal from radiation harm when gently heated, through a course of referred to as annealing.

“While Europa Clipper does dip into the radiation environment, once it comes out, it comes out long enough for those transistors the opportunity to heal and partially recover between flybys,” stated Jordan Evans, the Europa Clipper venture supervisor at JPL through the convention. “We can — I have high confidence, and the data bears it out — complete the original mission.”

This text is reproduced with permission and was first printed on September 10, 2024.