The Europa Clipper has unfurled its solar panels and is on its way to Jupiter, but it’s taking a circuitous route by way of Mars.
We can’t build a spacecraft that could survive orbiting Europa, given Jupiter’s fearsome radiation belts that encircle the moon.
So, the Clipper will dive through them with most of its hardware encased in a shielded cage.
With this design, the whole Clipper team is hoping to extend the life of the probe.
Doing so would show a lot of information about whether or not Europa could actually be suitable for life.
Now that its solar panels have been extended, the Europa Clipper is en route to Jupiter, albeit via a detour through Mars.
To the relief of the gathered scientists, engineers, and mission specialists, the launch itself proceeded without incident. In a matter of seconds, millions of hours of labor might have been lost if the Falcon Heavy hadn’t maintained its flawless success rate.
Dr. Sascha Kempf, the principal investigator for one of the nine instruments on board, told The Register, “I never enjoy the launches; it’s very stressful.”. Kempf has been a member of the team for the past 20 years, and he knows that his time there might have been for nothing.
This interplanetary probe from NASA is the biggest and most advanced to date. After more than five years, the approximately 6,000 kg (13,000 lb) Clipper will eventually reach Jupiter through gravity slingshots from Mars and the spacecraft’s home planet, even with the initial boost from Falcon Heavy’s thrusters. After arriving at Jupiter, the surveyor will set out on a four-year mission to explore, map, and sniff out Europa’s ice moon, which is thought to be among the best candidates to support the conditions required for life in the Solar System.
About ninety percent the size of our moon, Jupiter’s fourth largest moon is completely encased in a thick layer of ice, estimated to be between fifteen and twenty-five kilometers deep, concealing a vast ocean of liquid water beneath it. Because of its tight orbit around the largest planet in the Solar System, this ocean is constantly pulled and mixed by gravity, which keeps it warm. Liquid plumes that shoot out of its surface may reveal whether or not Europa’s ocean is conducive to supporting life.
Nine carefully crafted instruments that are intended to map the moon’s surface, scan its underwater oceans, and determine Europa’s composition have been added to the decades-long NASA planning that went into this mission. Other plans included landing and boring a submarine into the waters below.
With Jupiter’s terrifying radiation belts encircling the moon, we are unable to construct a spacecraft that could survive an orbit around Europa. With the majority of its hardware protected by a shielded cage, the Clipper will therefore plunge through them. Data will trickle back to Earth once the planet has left the danger zone, allowing us to determine whether or not Europa is a source of resources and life in the Solar System.
The bright future city perched atop a hill.
Galileo Galilei, the 17th-century astronomer who discovered Europa, would have been thrilled to witness the launch.
The German astronomer Simon Marius may have seen the moon around the same time as he did, but he did not broadcast his notes in time. Still, he is credited with being the first person to see it on January 8, 1610, despite a heated plagiarism dispute proving otherwise. Being one of the smoothest and brightest objects in the Solar System, it is made easier to spot by its highly reflective icy surface and size, as well as by the constantly shifting ice crust.
When Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 passed by Europa in 1973 and 1974, respectively, humanity saw its first grainy images of the continent. A slightly improved image obtained by the Voyager spacecraft revealed an ice-riven surface with no impact craters, which is crucial because it suggests that the surface is continually changing and reforming.
These pictures served as the inspiration for Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 sequel to his beloved novel 2001, which imagined spacecraft could refuel on the moon. Chinese astronauts’ attempt to do so tragically fails, with the spacecraft being overwhelmed by primitive life under the ice.
As expected, the Galileo spacecraft, which conducted 11 flybys during its eight-year mission—more than any other Jovian satellite—in 1995 obtained the first truly excellent images of the moon’s surface soon afterward. The probe had traveled 33,000 kilometers (20 thousand miles) from this distance.
Galileo’s magnetometer indicated that Europa’s sister moons, Ganymede and Callisto, both have sizable amounts of water on them, and that Europa most likely has an ocean beneath its icy crust. Additionally, the three moons have a flimsy atmosphere that extends above the surface known as a “surface-bound exosphere.”.
Scientists like Kempf and the other members of the Clipper team want to investigate this exosphere; however, in order to do so, they need assistance from the rest of the Solar System.
Mars is the first stop!
The probe takes a detour on its journey to the largest planet in the Solar System. To gain some speed, the spacecraft is first traveling to Mars.
The idea of using a planet as a free speed boost originated with UCLA mathematician Michael Minovitch, who solved the three-body problem of orbital computing a year later with NASA JPL’s IBM 7090, the fastest supercomputer at the time in 1961. If you included a third body in the equation, like the Sun, you could potentially get some pretty interesting orbital mechanics. Calculating orbits based on two bodies, like the Moon and the Earth, was fairly simple. The Clipper is just one of the early space probes that were powered by Minovitch’s equations.
The Register was informed by Stefano Campagnola, the mission design manager, that the probe will accelerate by two kilometers per second as it descends into Mars’ gravity well. The planet will receive a negligible loss of momentum in exchange.
“Though technically not in the best position to take advantage of our original orbit, we can save a lot of propellant by using Mars’s gravity for free—that is, if the timing works out. He clarified.
On top of a Falcon Heavy, NASA’s Europa Clipper departs for Jupiter’s moon.
As launch draws closer, the Europa Clipper spreads its wings.
Gas like that: CO2 may indicate the presence of life as it has been detected on Europa’s surface.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft will gather a “firehose of data” as it approaches Jupiter’s moon.
The probe will return to Earth for another gravity boost after being launched around Mars. This will enable it to turn off to Jupiter while preserving enough propellant to enable the probe to enter an orbit around the gas giant and approach Europa without having to stay in the hazardous radiation belt.
During the interview, Campagnola described how the Clipper team will modify the spacecraft’s trajectory and use the gravitational pull of Jupiter’s four largest moons to scan the majority of Europa’s surface and swoop down to collect surface conditions. By doing this, the fuel of the spacecraft will be preserved, and if the kit within can survive long enough, the mission may be extended.
preserving the hardware temporarily.
A human without shielding would be exposed to lethal levels of charged particle radiation each day they spent on Earth. However, the radiation also poses major challenges for instrumentation, which is why the Clipper design aims to house as many of the spacecraft’s essential parts in a radiation-hardened repository at the vehicle’s center.
For instance, Dr. Kempf was part of the team that created the Surface Dust Analyzer (SUDA), a sniffer tool intended to discover what lurks close to Europa’s surface for the flight. The device will record its results on an 8GB Flash memory chip stored in the repository. When the spacecraft departs from Europa and the radiation shield, it will fire the data back toward Earth.
He clarified that while the team cannot completely safeguard every component of the instrument, everything that can be stored in the repository can be. The goal of this design is to increase the probe’s lifespan, as stated by the Clipper team.
Getting everyone’s instruments to the proper location is another issue. According to him, flights using the MAss Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration/Europa (MASPEX) will descend as low as 25 kilometers from the moon’s surface. However, this will place the probe too high and cause pixel smearing on the cameras used to map the surface.
Kelly Miller, the group lead at Southwest Research Institute, which built the MASPEX instrument, explained that the same problems will affect the instrument, which is meant to detect particles around or even inside the moon.
The Hubble Space Telescope has detected eruptions from inside Europa, and if all goes according to plan, the spacecraft may be able to catch one of the plumes or its afterglow. By doing this, a wealth of information regarding the viability of life on Europa would become visible.
Although Miller told The Register that she was optimistic the instrumentation would hold up for many more flybys, the Clipper’s original mission plan called for 49 flybys of the moon. Remember, several NASA missions have continued far beyond their originally scheduled shutdown periods.
But in the end, the Clipper will be purposefully destroyed. The mission will instead be set on a collision course with Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s other satellites, because the team doesn’t want to take the chance of the spacecraft hitting Europa and contaminating the moon after all the valuable science has been collected.
Though it will be a sad end for a probe that may be our best opportunity to date to study the habitability of environments beyond Earth, the vast amounts of data it has returned could provide crucial hints that we are not alone in the Solar System. ®.
