NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter’s moon Europa to see whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life, honing our insights into astrobiology.
A 2016 artist’s concept of the Europa Clipper spacecraft. The design is changing as the spacecraft is developed. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Europa Clipper would orbit Jupiter about every two weeks, providing many opportunities for close flybys of Europa.
In total, the solar-powered orbiter would perform 45 flybys at altitudes ranging from 25 to 2,700 km (16 to 1,700 miles), imaging the moon’s icy surface at high resolution and investigating its composition and the structure of its interior and icy shell.
When it’s fully assembled, Europa Clipper will be as large as an SUV with solar arrays long enough to span a basketball court.
The assembly effort is already underway in clean rooms at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
Before year’s end, most of the flight hardware — including a suite of nine science instruments — is expected to be complete.
The main body of Europa Clipper is a giant 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) propulsion module, designed and constructed by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, with help from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and JPL.
The module, fitted with electronics, radios, cabling, and the propulsion subsystem, will ship to JPL this spring.
The spacecraft’s 3-m- (10-foot) wide high-gain antenna also will be arriving at JPL soon.
An engineer inspects the radio frequency (RF) panel of NASA’s Europa Clipper in a cleanroom at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The RF panel hosts all the RF subsystem electronics and an intricate routing network of switches, filters, and waveguides, which carry the RF signal to and from eight antennas distributed around the spacecraft. Image credit: Credits: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
“We’re moving into the phase where we see the pieces all come together as a flight system,” said Europa Clipper project manager Jan Chodas, a researcher at JPL.
“It will be very exciting to see the hardware, the flight software, and the instruments get integrated and tested.”
“To me, it’s the next level of discovery. We’ll learn how the system we designed will actually perform.”
“I don’t know how I’ll feel, seeing this come together. I suspect it will be somewhat overwhelming. It’s happening — it’s becoming real. It’s becoming tangible,” said Europa Clipper project scientist Robert Pappalardo, also from JPL.
“At the same time, the level of difficulty kicks up several notches as the layers of the project merge.”
“All of the parallel paths of hardware and software development will start to join together in a way that’s very visible to the team,” Europa Clipper deputy project manager Jordan Evans, also of JPL.
“Everybody’s eyes turn toward the integrated system that’s coming together, which is exciting.”
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This article is based on text provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
