As NASA’s largest planetary spacecraft heads to the solar system’s largest planet to study one of its moons, let’s take a closer look inside the numbers of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission.
- 9 — The spacecraft carries nine science instruments and a gravity experiment that uses the telecommunications system. All the science instruments will operate simultaneously on every flyby, and scientists will then layer the data together to paint a full picture of Europa.
- 24 — The Europa Clipper spacecraft has 24 engines.
- 90 — Europa’s diameter is about 90% that of Earth’s Moon, with an equatorial diameter of 1,940 miles (3,122 kilometers).
- 100 — The spacecraft extends 100 feet (30.5 meters) from one end to the other and about 58 feet (17.6 meters) across. That’s about the size of a basketball court, thanks in large part to the solar arrays, which need to be huge so they can collect enough sunlight while near Jupiter to power the instruments, electronics, and other subsystems.
- 105 — Europa Clipper is NASA’s Launch Services Program 105th end-to-end mission.
- 1610 — Galileo Galilei found Europa, along with Jovian moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Io, with his homemade telescope in January 1610.
- 2030 — Mission planners are sending Europa Clipper past Mars and then Earth, using the planets’ gravity as a slingshot to add speed to the spacecraft’s trek. After journeying about 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) over 5 1/2 years, the spacecraft will fire its engines to enter orbit around Jupiter in 2030.
- 4,000 — Since the mission was officially approved in 2015, more than 4,000 people have contributed to Europa Clipper, including teams who work for contractors and subcontractors. Currently, about a thousand people work on the mission, including more than 220 scientists from both the U.S. and Europe.
- 13,000 — At the time of launch, Europa Clipper will weigh approximately 13,000 pounds (6,000 kilograms) with nearly 6,000 pounds (2,750 kilograms) of propellant.
- 20,000 — Jupiter is surrounded by a gigantic magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s. As the field spins, it captures and accelerates charged particles, creating radiation that can damage spacecraft. Mission engineers designed a spacecraft vault to shield sensitive electronics from radiation, and they plotted orbits that will limit the time Europa Clipper spends in most radiation-heavy areas around Jupiter.
- 2,600,000 — As part of a mission campaign called “Message in a Bottle,” the spacecraft is carrying a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, cosigned by millions of people from nearly every country in the world. Their names have been stenciled onto a microchip attached to a tantalum metal plate that seals the spacecraft’s electronics vault. Along with the poem and microchip, the plate features waveforms of people saying the word “water” in over 100 spoken languages.
- 1,800,000,000 — NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Europa.
Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory 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, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall 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, which will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA Kennedy in Florida in just under 40 minutes.