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The Europa Clipper spacecraft reached an important milestone on Monday and is on track to launch next month to explore and look for signs of habitability on one of Jupiter’s moons, according to NASA. The launch window for his journey opens on October 10.
The mission achieved Key Decision Point E, a critical planning step that allowed the mission to proceed with launch. The approval was a relief for the Europa Clipper crew after a potential problem with transistors on the spacecraft was discovered in May.
Transistors help control the vehicle’s flow of electricity, and engineers were concerned about the components’ durability in Jupiter’s harsh radiation environment.
The transistors were extensively tested over four months at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California; The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland; and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The team was able to complete a necessary test on time, preventing a 13-month delay in the launch to explore Europa, an ice-covered world that could potentially support life in the only salty ocean that is below the surface. Europa Clipper is carrying 10 scientific instruments that could determine whether life is possible elsewhere in our solar system other than Earth.
Now, Europa Clipper has been approved for launch, with no change to the mission plan, targets or route.
“It’s the last kind of big review before we get into that launch fever, and we’re very pleased to say that they’ve passed that review with the clear today,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during a news conference Monday.
Solving the radiation problem
In May, the manufacturer of the transistors warned the mission team that the parts may not be as radiation resistant as previously believed. The transistors are located across the spacecraft.
Jupiter is otherworldly as the largest planet in our solar system, and has a magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s. That magnetic field traps and accelerates charged particles to high speeds. The fast-moving particles release energy in the form of intense radiation that illuminates Europa and Jupiter’s closest moons.
Any spacecraft going to Jupiter needs radiation-hardened electronics.
“Jupiter has more radiation than any planet in our solar system, which is one of the reasons why the Jupiter system is so challenging to explore,” said Jordan Evans, Europa Clipper project manager at JPL.
“Europe is located near the outer edge of the worst part of that radiation belt,” he said. “Flying close to Europa exposes us to this high flow of damaging particles, so the mission and Europa Clipper engineers need to be sure that the spacecraft components can survive in that radiation environment for the duration of our four-day mission year.”
Data from previous NASA missions to Jupiter, including the Juno probe currently studying the planet and some of its moons, were used to validate the testing process for the transistors, Evans said.
The tests have been carried out 24 hours a day since May, and simulated space flight conditions to determine how the spacecraft and its components would fare when the vehicle makes 49 flybys of Europa and eventually 80 orbits around Jupiter over a period of four years.
The team found that the transistors can heal themselves between the flying poles.
“We concluded, after all this testing, during our orbit around Jupiter, that even though Europa Clipper goes into the radiation environment, when it comes out, it comes out far enough to give an opportunity for those transistors to cure and partially recover between the flying poles. ,” Evans said.
A radiation monitor on the spacecraft will allow the team to check how the transistors are doing.
“I am personally very confident that we can complete the original mission to explore Europa as planned,” Evans said.
Explore a sea world
When Curt Niebur, the Europa Clipper program scientist, joined NASA in 2003, he was tasked with advancing the Europa mission. Every year, the effort to design and build Europa Clipper looks more difficult, he said.
“No year has been more difficult than last year and especially last summer,” Niebur said. “But through it all, the one thing we never doubted was that this was worth it. It’s an opportunity for us to explore, not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today — an opportunity to explore for the first time this new kind of world which we recently discovered. called an ocean world that is just completely submerged and covered in an ocean of liquid water completely unlike anything we’ve seen before. That’s what awaits us in Europe.”
Europa Clipper is not a life detection mission, Niebur added.
The main goals of the mission are aimed at finding out if Europa has the right ingredients to support life as we know it – including water, energy and chemistry. And with no scientific instrument that can directly determine that life exists, Clipper can’t definitively find evidence of it, he said.
“You can bet your bottom dollar that if Europa Clipper tells us, yes, those ingredients are there, we’ll be knocking on the door fighting for a second life-seeking mission,” Niebur said.
Europa Clipper will be critical in helping NASA decide where to launch follow-up missions, such as parts of the ice crust that may be thin and where water from the subsurface ocean may be flowing, said Laurie Leshin, director of JPL. .
“If we get there and we do this investigation, and the good news is that all the ingredients are there and it’s habitable, that means there are two places in one solar system where all the ingredients for a proper livable life. now at the same time,” said Niebur.
“Think about what that means when you extend that result to the billions and billions of other solar systems in this galaxy,” he said. “Putting aside the ‘Is there life’ question on Europa, just the question of habitability in itself opens up a huge new paradigm for the search for life in the galaxy.”
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