Preparations are advancing for NASA’s new mission next October. The Europa Clipper mission passed an important milestone in February: its scientific instruments have been incorporated into the enormous spacecraft, which is assembled at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in southern California. .
The spacecraft, which will be launched in October from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will head towards Europa, Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, where a salty ocean beneath its frozen surface could have conditions suitable for life. Europa Clipper will not land; instead, after reach the Jupiter system in 2030, The spacecraft will orbit that planet 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, hand in hand, to answer our most pressing questions about Europa,” said Robert Pappalardo, JPL project scientist for this mission. “We will learn what makes Europa active, 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 the way all instruments will work in sync while collecting data to achieve the mission’s scientific objectives. During each flyby, the full suite of instruments will obtain measurements and images that will be overlaid to show the full picture of Europa.
“Scientific research 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 make concessions between them.”
Europa, Jupiter’s moon
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 this satellite. That data will be key to understanding its ocean, because this field is created, or induced, by the electrical conductivity of salt ocean water as Europa moves through Jupiter’s strong magnetic field. Working in conjunction with the magnetometer, there is an instrument that will analyze the plasma (charged particles) around Europa, which can distort the 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 surface and interior of the moon. Although the atmosphere is very tenuous, with only one hundred billionth the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere, scientists hope it contains abundant clues about the moon. Researchers have evidence from space and ground-based telescopes that there could be plumes of water vapor rising from beneath the moon’s surface, and observations from previous missions suggest that ice and dust particles are being ejected into space by the impact. of micrometeorites.
Three instruments will help investigate the atmosphere and the particles it contains: a mass spectrometer will analyze the gases, a surface dust analyzer will examine the dust, and a spectrograph will collect ultraviolet light to look for vapor plumes and identify how properties change. of this dynamic atmosphere over time.
Meanwhile, Europa Clipper’s cameras will take wide-angle and narrow-angle images 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 separate imager to measure temperatures will help scientists identify warmer regions where water or recent ice deposits could be near the surface.
An imaging spectrometer will map ice, salts and organic molecules on the moon’s surface. The sophisticated suite of imagers will also support the entire suite of instruments by collecting images that will provide context for the set of data that will be collected.
Of course, scientists also need a better understanding of the ice sheet itself. This outer shell—which is estimated to be about 15 to 25 kilometers (10 to 15 miles) thick—could be geologically active, giving rise to the fracture patterns that are visible on the surface. Using the radar instrument, the mission will study the ice sheet, including searching for water in and beneath it. (The instrument’s electronics are now aboard the spacecraft, while its antennas will be mounted on the spacecraft’s solar panels at the Kennedy Center later this year.)
Finally, there is the internal structure of Europe. To learn more about this, scientists will measure the moon’s gravitational field at various points in its orbit around Jupiter. Observing how the signals transmitted by the spacecraft are pulled by Europa’s gravity may give the research team more information about the moon’s interior. Scientists will use the spacecraft’s telecommunications equipment to carry out this scientific research.
With nine instruments and a telecommunications system on board the spacecraft, the mission team has begun testing the entire spacecraft for the first time. Once tests with Europa Clipper are fully completed, the team will send the spacecraft to the Kennedy Center in preparation for its launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
