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NASA’s Europa Clipper, with all its instruments installed, is visible in the High Bay 1 clean room at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on January 19. The tent around the spacecraft was erected to support electromagnetic testing. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
With less than nine months left in the countdown to launch, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission has passed a major milestone: its scientific instruments have been added to the massive spacecraft, which is being assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the agency in Southern California.
The spacecraft, which will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in October, will head to Europa, Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, where a salty ocean beneath the icy surface may contain conditions suitable for life. Europa Clipper will not land; Rather, after arriving in the Jupiter system in 2030, the spacecraft will orbit Jupiter for four years, performing 49 flybys of Europa and using its powerful suite of nine scientific instruments to investigate the moon’s potential as a habitable environment.
“The instruments work together to answer our most pressing questions about Europa,” said JPL’s Robert Pappalardo, project scientist for the mission. “We will learn what makes Europa tick, from its core and rocky interior to its ocean and ice sheet, its very thin atmosphere and the space environment around it.”
The hallmark of Europa Clipper scientific research is how all instruments will operate in sync while collecting data to achieve the mission’s scientific objectives. During each flyby, the full range of instruments will collect measurements and images that will be overlaid to paint the full picture of Europe.
“Science is better if we get observations at the same time,” Pappalardo said. “What we are looking for is integration, so that at any time we are using all the instruments to study Europe at the same time and there is no need to have to negotiate between them.”
Inside out
By studying the environment around Europa, scientists will learn more about the moon’s interior. The spacecraft carries a magnetometer to measure the magnetic field around the moon. That data will be key to understanding the ocean, because the field is created or induced by the electrical conductivity of the ocean’s salt water as Europa moves through Jupiter’s strong magnetic field. Working in conjunction with the magnetometer is an instrument that will analyze the plasma (charged particles) around Europa, which can distort magnetic fields. Together, they will ensure the most accurate measurements possible.
What the mission discovers about Europa’s atmosphere will also provide information about the moon’s surface and interior. While the atmosphere is weak, with only one 100 billionth the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere, scientists hope it contains a treasure trove of clues about the moon. They have evidence from space and ground-based telescopes that there may be plumes of water vapor rising from beneath the moon’s surface, and observations from past missions suggest that ice and dust particles are being ejected into space by micrometeorite impacts.
Three instruments will help investigate the atmosphere and its associated particles: a mass spectrometer will analyze gases, a surface dust analyzer will examine dust, and a spectrograph will collect ultraviolet light to look for plumes and identify how the properties of the dynamic atmosphere change over time. . .
Meanwhile, Europa Clipper’s cameras will take wide- and narrow-angle photographs of the surface, providing the first high-resolution global map of Europa. Color stereoscopic images will reveal any changes to the surface due to geological activity. A standalone imager that measures temperatures will help scientists identify warmer regions where water or recent ice deposits may be present near the surface.