Tag: Jet Propulsion Lab

Mission controllers for NASA’s Europa Clipper have received full acquisition of signal from the spacecraft.

NASA’s Europa Clipper will be the first mission to conduct a detailed science investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Scientists believe Europa has a salty ocean beneath its icy crust that potentially could hold the ingredients necessary to sustain life.

The spacecraft, the largest NASA has ever built for a planetary mission, launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39A in Florida at 12:06 p.m. EDT. This will be NASA’s Launch Services Program’s third primary mission launching on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

Jupiter is on average some 480 million miles from Earth — as both planets are in motion around the Sun, the distances between the two vary. Europa Clipper will travel 1.8 billion miles over more than five years to reach the Jovian system in April 2030, using “gravity assists” of two other planets to help it accelerate towards Jupiter. After launch, Europa Clipper will head toward Mars, coming to within 300 to 600 miles of the surface, then slingshot back toward Earth, coming about 2,000 miles from the planet. Through these gravity assists, Europa Clipper will achieve the velocity needed to reach Jupiter in April 2030, when the spacecraft will fire its engines to enter orbit around the solar system’s largest planet.

After it begins orbiting Jupiter, Europa Clipper will spend about a year altering its trajectory to prepare for its first Europa flyby. The spacecraft will then spend about three years soaring past Europa dozens of times and sending data back to Earth. Over the course of the mission, the spacecraft will investigate nearly the entire moon.

NASA Launch Manager Tim Dunn has just given NASA’s Europa Clipper mission a “go” for launch! Mission and launch managers are counting down to the launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

This will be NASA’s second interplanetary mission for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, following launch of NASA’s Psyche mission exactly a year ago yesterday. Europa Clipper is reusing the side boosters from NASA’s Psyche mission for this launch.

Because Europa Clipper needs a lot of energy to start it on its interplanetary trajectory to Jupiter, the rocket for this launch will be fully expendable, with the exception of a recoverable fairing. This means that there will be no return of first-stage boosters for this launch. Although SpaceX has flown a fully expendable Falcon Heavy before, this is the first time that NASA’s Launch Services Program is launching a mission for the agency with this Falcon Heavy configuration, though the program has extensive experience now with both expendable as well as reusable rockets. In addition to not recovering any boosters, technicians removed components only needed for reuse to increase the performance of the rocket, to launch the largest planetary spacecraft NASA has ever developed and give it the power it needs to travel to Jupiter.

Launch is in less two minutes!

We are about 10 minutes from launch and the weather outlook for NASA’s Europa Clipper launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida remains outstanding. Weather officials the U.S. Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station predict a 95% chance of favorable conditions for liftoff of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission.

Along with the science instruments and hardware needed for NASA’s Europa Clipper’s long journey to the Jovian system, the spacecraft also continues the long legacy of NASA spacecraft carrying inspirational messages from Earth, including the Pioneer Plaque, the Voyager Golden Record, and engravings carried aboard NASA’s Mars rovers.

The original poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, is engraved on Europa Clipper’s vault plate in her own handwriting. The poem connects the two water worlds — Earth, yearning to reach out and understand what makes a world habitable, and Europa, waiting with secrets yet to be explored.

Limón, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress since 2022, wrote the poem as part of her laureateship and debuted it on June 1, 2023, to kick off the NASA Message in a Bottle campaign, which invited people around the world to sign their names to the poem.

Over 2.6 million people submitted their names to be stenciled on a microchip that will travel to Europa alongside the poem. The campaign was a special collaboration, uniting art and science, by NASA, the U.S. Poet Laureate, and the Library of Congress.

Limón’s poem and the names of more than 2.6 million participants etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft will soon travel together on Europa Clipper’s 1.8-billion-mile voyage to the Jupiter system.

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is the largest the agency has ever built for a planetary mission. Data from previous NASA missions has provided scientists with strong evidence that an enormous salty ocean lies underneath the frozen surface of Europa. Europa Clipper will orbit Jupiter and make nearly 50 flybys of Europa to determine the thickness of the Europa’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize the moon’s geology to help scientists better understand the potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.

Europa Clipper Spacecraft Facts

• With its solar arrays, or “wings,” deployed, Europa Clipper spans more than 100 feet (about 30 meters) — about the length of a basketball court. The huge arrays are needed to collect sunlight to power the spacecraft while it operates at Jupiter, which is more than five times as far from the Sun as Earth is.
• The spacecraft has 24 rocket engines.
• The spacecraft has nine dedicated science instruments, plus a gravity and radio science investigation.
• At launch, Europa Clipper will weigh approximately 13,000 pounds (6,000 kilograms).
• During processing, teams loaded 6,067 pounds (2,752 kilograms) of propellant into the spacecraft.
• Europa Clipper’s propulsion module is an aluminum cylinder 10 feet (3 meters) long and 5 feet wide. It holds the spacecraft’s 24 engines, fuel tanks, as well as the spacecraft’s helium pressurant tanks.
• Europa Clipper’s electronics are enclosed in a vault with walls made of 1/3-inch-thick (9.2-mm) sheets of aluminum-zinc alloy to protect the electronics from Jupiter’s intense radiation. These electronics include computers (or the “brains” of the spacecraft), flight software, and more.
• The vault plate, made of tantalum metal about 1 millimeter thick and about 7 by 11 inches (18 by 28 centimeters), is part of the structure that will protect Europa Clipper’s electronics from Jupiter’s harmful radiation. It is engraved with poetry, artwork, and other messages that pay tribute to the connection between Europa’s ocean world and our own. It also carries a dime-size microchip stenciled with more than 2.6 million names submitted by the public.
• Europa Clipper’s 10-foot-diameter (3-meter-diameter) high-gain antenna and other smaller radio antennas will be used to receive commands from Earth through NASA’s Deep Space Network, send data back to engineers and scientists and will be used for gravity and radio science investigations.
• Europa Clipper will use inertial sensors, star cameras, and special hardware to determine and control its position in space.
• Europa Clipper carries pumps that circulate fluids through pipes to all the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics, carrying heat from hot spots to cold spots. Europa Clipper also has temperature sensors, heaters, blanketing, and a radiator with louvers that can be opened to shed heat to help regulate the spacecraft’s temperature.
• Instructions on how to build paper, toy brick, and 3D-printed models of the Europa Clipper spacecraft can be found on NASA’s website.

Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California led the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The main spacecraft body was designed by APL in collaboration with NASA JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the launch service for the Europa Clipper spacecraft.