Europa Bound
Europa's chaotic surfaces (credit: Galileo/JPL/NASA)
The Europa Clipper's odyssey has begun.
According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), when the spacecraft arrives at Jupiter the remote sensing laboratory will canvas and survey its icy moon Europa. The Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft ever constructed weighing in at 13,000 pound and will be larger than a basketball court when its solar arrays are extended. Its name harkens back to the era of the 'clipper ships' that sailed the Earth's oceans in the 15th Century making new discoveries everywhere. The 'clipper' is scheduled to fly past Europa's surface 49 times, coming as close as 16 miles above the ice looking for the ingredients of life.
Europa's surface features were first observed by earlier encounters by the Galileo probe that orbited Jupiter for 14 years until ending its mission in 2003. During that time, the robotic craft documented the internal and external processes shaping Europa's icy crust. The results of various processes observed by Galileo, likely caused by the presence of a liquid ocean of water beneath the ice, are seen as dark spots, lobe-shaped flows, mottled terrain, knobs, and dark areas along ridges and banded zones. A collage made using Galileo images illustrates the diversity of these surface features created from the constant tugging of Jupiter's gravity, as well as by Europa's neighboring moons, Io and Ganymede. These combined gravitational forces affect Europa's interior and exterior creating chaotic areas terrain by the alternating extension and compression pulling at Europa's surface. Such novel and deformed structures will receive major attention by the sensors, scanners, and spectrometers on the robotic science lab to determine theircomposition and chemistry.
Europa Clipper in protective nose-cone (credit: NASA)
The spacecraft will begin orbiting Jupiter in 2030 and will begin its science-focused flybys of Europa, while looping around the gas giant, the following year. A variable orbit was designed to maximize the science and minimize the exposure to Jupiter’s intense radiation which could damage the probe's suite of instruments. The Europa Clipper was encased in a protective nose-cone atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying over 6,000 pounds of the propellant required to reach Jupiter.
It was successfully launched from the NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket. The Europa Clipper will sail nearly 2 billion miles on a trajectory that will leverage gravity assists, first from Mars in four months and then a second from Earth in 2026. The flawless launch required the precision of a 15 second window to meet its required path to Jupiter. Five minutes after the liftoff, the rocket's second stage fired and its payload in the nose cone, opened to reveal the Clipper. An hour afterwards, the craft separated from the rocket and was bound on its voyage.
What wonders await this 21st Century 'clipper ship' can only be imagined. WHB