It’s a go: NASA’s Europa Clipper will launch for the Jovian moon next month, the agency announced this week, after hurried reviews of the spacecraft’s ability to handle radiation in the Jovian environment.
NASA confirmed on Monday that the spacecraft’s launch date is October 10, a month from today, on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. But that launch date was hardly a sure thing. In July, NASA found that some of the Europa Clipper’s transistors, which help control electrical flows through the spacecraft, would degrade when exposed to radiation in the planet’s system. If those transistors failed, the entire mission would be in jeopardy.
NASA engineers’ follow-up reviews of the transistors found that, while the devices would degrade in Jupiter’s radiative environment, the three-week intervals between each Europa flyby should give them time to recover. As a result, the October 10 launch date remains unchanged.
Europa Clipper is a NASA mission charged with investigating Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. The mission will try to answer a longstanding question of human existence: does life exist beyond Earth? Europa is suspected to contain an ocean of liquid salty water beneath its frozen surface. As water is a prerequisite for life as we know it, Europa’s subsurface oceans are one of the most exciting places in the solar system to do astrobiology. Europa is also tugged by Jupiter’s gravity, producing heat that could bestow necessary energy for life on the moon.
To be clear, the mission’s task is not to actually find that alien life. Rather, the hope is that the 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) Europa Clipper will reveal whether there are places on the icy moon that could support life.
At the same time, ESA’s JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) mission is on its way to the Jovian system to ask similar questions of three of Jupiter’s moons, including Europa. NASA’s Juno mission has been observing the Jovian system for the past eight years, but that mission is set to expire in 2025 (next year, for those keeping track.) There will be a lull between Juno’s work concluding and the newer two missions arriving in the system, but once they get there we’ll get a bold new look at Jupiter and its most prominent satellites.
The Europa Clipper is outfitted with a suite of instruments that will be used to investigate the moon, including imaging systems, a magnetometer, a spectrograph and spectrometer, and others. These systems will enable NASA scientists to gather as much knowledge as possible about Europa while it orbits the moon. The Lucy probe is not headed directly to the Jovian system but will instead focus its investigations on a group of asteroids known as the Trojans, which share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun.
Europa Clipper’s orbit will send it looping around Jupiter 80 times, making 49 flybys of Europa, according to Space Policy Online. Some of those flybys will take the spacecraft to within 16 miles (25 kilometers) of the moon’s surface, giving scientists an unprecedented, sharp look at the moon’s crust. The probe is slated to reach the Jovian system in April 2030.
Despite the upcoming launch, the future of similar NASA missions is now uncertain. Just today, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that NASA’s ability to keep up with national objectives long-term is at risk. The report, requested by Congress in 2022, found that the space agency is hampered by outdated infrastructure, a pressure to follow through on shorter-term objectives, inefficiencies, and a reliance on industry partners.
It’ll be a long wait between next month and the turn of the decade, and as has proven out with the Mars Sample Return mission, plenty can happen in those intervening years. But we’ll have all our fingers crossed—and why not, our toes too—for the next generation of Jovian interpreters.
