NASA Completes Main Body of Europa Clipper Spacecraft – Will Search for Life on Jupiter’s Icy Moon Europa & More Trending News

NASA’s mission to explore Jupiter’s icy moon takes a big step forward as engineers deliver a major component of the spacecraft.

Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, almost certainly has a vast ocean beneath its icy shell. In fact, scientists believe this ocean contains more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. The complex chemistry required for life as we know it to exist requires liquid water, making this ocean one of the key reasons astrobiologists want to study Europa.

NASA’s Europa Clipper will be equipped with science instruments needed to study Europa to see if it harbors conditions suitable for supporting life. It is expected to launch in 2024 and take several years to reach Jupiter. Once there, it will orbit the planet, during which it will soar past Europa some 45 times or so. During each flyby, it will scan the moon and then report the data back to Earth.

Now, the main body of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft has just been delivered to the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. Over the next two years there, engineers and technicians will finish assembling the craft by hand before testing it to make sure it can withstand the journey to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

The spacecraft body is the mission’s workhorse. Standing 10 feet (3 meters) tall and 5 feet (1.5 meters) wide, it’s an aluminum cylinder integrated with electronics, radios, thermal loop tubing, cabling, and the propulsion system. With its solar arrays and other deployable equipment stowed for launch, Europa Clipper will be as large as an SUV; when extended, the solar arrays make the craft the size of a basketball court. It is the largest NASA spacecraft ever developed for a planetary mission.

“It’s an exciting time for the whole project team and a huge milestone,” said Jordan Evans, the mission’s project manager at JPL. “This delivery brings us one step closer to launch and the Europa Clipper science investigation.”

This video captures the supply of the core of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft to the company’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory designed and constructed the spacecraft physique in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Set to launch in October 2024, Europa Clipper will conduct almost 50 flybys of Europa, which scientists are assured harbors an inside ocean containing twice as a lot water as Earth’s oceans mixed. And the ocean could presently have circumstances appropriate for supporting life. The spacecraft’s 9 science devices will collect information on Europa’s ambiance, floor, and inside – data that scientists will use to gauge the depth and salinity of the ocean, the thickness of the ice crust, and potential plumes that could be venting subsurface water into area.

Those devices have already got begun arriving at JPL, the place the part often known as meeting, check, and launch operations has been underway since March. The ultraviolet spectrograph, known as Europa-UVS, arrived in March. Next got here the spacecraft’s thermal emission imaging instrument, E-THEMIS, delivered by the scientists and engineers main its improvement at Arizona State University. E-THEMIS is a classy infrared digicam designed to map Europa’s temperatures and assist scientists discover clues concerning the moon’s geological exercise – together with areas the place liquid water could also be close to the floor.

By the tip of 2022, most of the flight {hardware} and the rest of the science devices are anticipated to be full.

The Whole Package

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, designed Europa Clipper’s physique in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The flight system designed, built, and tested by APL – using a team of hundreds of engineers and technicians – was the physically largest system ever built by APL,” stated APL’s Tom Magner, the mission’s assistant venture supervisor.

The work on the primary module continues now at JPL.

“What arrived at JPL represents essentially an assembly phase unto itself. Under APL’s leadership, this delivery includes work by that institution and two NASA centers. Now the team will take the system to an even higher level of integration,” stated Evans.

The fundamental construction is definitely two stacked aluminum cylinders dotted with threaded holes for bolting on the spacecraft’s cargo: the radio frequency module, radiation displays, propulsion electronics, energy converters, and wiring. The radio frequency subsystem will energy eight antennas, together with an infinite high-gain antenna that measures 10 ft (3 meters) vast. The construction’s net of electrical wires and connectors, known as the harness, weighs 150 kilos (68 kilograms) by itself; if stretched out, it could run nearly 2,100 ft (640 meters) – twice the perimeter of a soccer subject.

The heavy-duty electronics vault, constructed to face up to the extraordinary radiation of the Jupiter system, can be built-in with the primary spacecraft construction together with the science devices.

Inside the primary physique of the spacecraft are two tanks – one to carry gasoline, one for oxidizer – and the tubing that can carry their contents to an array of 24 engines, the place they are going to mix to create a managed chemical response that produces thrust.

“Our engines are dual purpose,” stated JPL’s Tim Larson, the deputy venture supervisor. “We use them for big maneuvers, including when we approach Jupiter and need a large burn to be captured in Jupiter’s orbit. But they’re also designed for smaller maneuvers to manage the attitude of the spacecraft and to fine tune the precision flybys of Europa and other solar system bodies along the way.”

Those huge and small maneuvers will come into play so much in the course of the six-year, 1.8-billion-mile (2.9-billion-kilometer) journey to this ocean world, which Europa Clipper will start investigating in earnest in 2031.

More About the Mission

Missions akin to Europa Clipper contribute to the sector of astrobiology, the interdisciplinary analysis on the variables and circumstances of distant worlds that would harbor life as we all know it. While Europa Clipper shouldn’t be a life-detection mission, it would conduct detailed reconnaissance of Europa and examine whether or not the icy moon, with its subsurface ocean, has the potential to help life. Understanding Europa’s habitability will assist scientists higher perceive how life developed on Earth and the potential for discovering life past our planet.

Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL leads the event of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with APL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, executes program administration of the Europa Clipper mission.

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