NASA’s Europa Clipper Is Off And Running

The largest spacecraft ever launched on a planetary mission, NASA’s Europa Clipper is doing well and speeding along toward the first of two gravity assists intended to achieve a 2030 arrival at Jupiter, a NASA update says.

Launched Oct. 14 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the $5.2 billion mission will perform a series of 49 flybys of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa beginning in 2031 to assess its habitability with a suite of 10 instruments.

So far, Europa Clipper is transmitting encouraging engineering data, say updates provided by Robert Pappalardo, the mission project scientist; Jordan Evans, the mission project manager; and Tim Larson, the mission deputy project manager. The men briefed a Nov. 21 session of the Lunar Planetary Institute’s Outer Planets Analysis Group and then conducted a Nov. 25 mission status update from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“Most of what the team is focusing on now is understanding the small, interesting things in the data that help them understand the behavior of the spacecraft on a deeper level,” Evans said. “That’s really good to see.”

Post launch, Clipper deployed its two solar arrays, each the length of a basketball court. This was followed by deployment of the magnetometer science instrument’s 28-ft. boom, which carries three sensors for measuring the magnetic field around Europa to confirm the presence of an ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust, as well as assess its depth and salinity.

Next came the deployment of four high-frequency radar antennas that extend about 58 ft. in a crosswise pattern from the solar arrays. The spacecraft also deployed eight 9-ft., very-high-frequency rectangular antennas.

The remaining science instruments are to be powered on and off in December and January to check their post-launch status. But the probe’s visible imager and dust and gas mass spectrometers will remain covered for about three years to prevent solar damage before the spacecraft departs the inner Solar System.

Europa Clipper is headed toward a March 1, 2025, close encounter with Mars for the first of the mission’s two gravity assists. Once at Mars, the probe’s thermal imager is to be activated to gather multicolored images of the red planet as a test. Radar data is to be gathered as well during the initial gravity assist.

Then it is back toward Earth for Clipper for the second velocity-enhancing gravity assist in December 2026 that will also enable ground teams to measure the Earth’s magnetic field to calibrate the magnetometer.

Scientists expect the flybys of Europa—which is slightly smaller than Earth’s moon—to generate data about the thickness of its ice shell, how it interacts with the ocean and its chemistry as well as the geological features on its floor. The findings will provide additional insight into the astrobiology potential of habitable planets beyond Earth.

NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 flyby missions provided the first-ever close-up imagery of Europa in 1979. That was followed by the agency’s Galileo mission, which entered orbit around Jupiter in 1995.