, keeping the highly anticipated mission on track for its Oct. 10 launch.){kind=link}
Agency's long-awaited Europa Clipper probe bound for an icy moon of Jupiter is on track for liftoff next month.
Europa Clipper, which will closely study Jupiter’s potentially life-supporting moon Europa, today (September 9) passed a crucial technical review called Key Decision Point E (KDP-E). The good news means Clipper can proceed to final preparations for launch, which is scheduled to take place aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on October 10.
“I'm delighted to say that we are confident that our beautiful spacecraft and our capable crew are ready for launch operations and our full science mission to Europa,” Laurie Leshin, director of Agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, told reporters this afternoon.
“This is an epic mission.”
— Mission Program Scientist Curt Niebur
A few months ago, surpassing KDP-E might have seemed like a long shot for the $5 billion Clipper mission.
In May, the mission team realized that Clipper's transistors, which control the flow of electricity in the spacecraft, are failing at lower radiation doses than previously thought. This could be a big problem, given that Europa is located within a high-radiation zone, thanks to Jupiter's enormously strong magnetic field.
Related: Why Agency's Europa Clipper Mission to Jupiter's Icy Moon Is So Important
But after four months of nearly non-stop testing and analysis, the Clipper team determined that the transistors should last the entire four-year science mission.
Clipper will orbit Jupiter and study Europa — thought to harbor a massive ocean beneath its icy crust — over the course of nearly 50 close flybys. This mission design means the probe will be in a radiation danger zone for a relatively small percentage of its time in the Jupiter system. And that will give the transistors a chance to recover, team members said.
“We've concluded, after all of this testing, that during our orbits around Jupiter, while Europa Clipper is going into the radiation environment, once it comes out, it's coming out long enough for those transistors to have a chance to heal and partially recover between flybys,” Europa Clipper project manager Jordan Evans, also of JPL, said during today's press conference.
The team will continue to monitor the transistors after Clipper launches, Evans said. But, he added, “the Europa Clipper project and I personally have a lot of confidence that we will be able to complete the original mission to explore Europa as planned.”
Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft Agency has ever built for planetary exploration. With its massive solar panels deployed, the probe will be about 30 meters (98 feet) long, making it longer than a basketball court. At launch, Clipper will weigh about 6,000 kilograms (13,000 pounds), with fuel accounting for nearly half of that total.
The probe will carry nine scientific instruments to the Jupiter system, where it is expected to arrive in 2030. Clipper will use that equipment to study Europa's icy surface and characterize its subsurface ocean, with the ultimate goal of determining whether the moon is capable of supporting life as we know it.
“This is an epic mission. It's an opportunity for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that could be habitable today, right now,” said Europa Clipper program scientist Curt Niebur, who is based at Agency Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“It was definitely worth the wait,” he said of the mission. “It was worth the hard work.”