When it's fully assembled, NASA's Europa Clipper will be as large as an SUV with solar arrays long enough to span a basketball court - all the better to help power the spacecraft during its journey to Jupiter's icy moon Europa. And just about every detail of the spacecraft will have been hand-crafted.

The assembly effort is already underway in clean rooms at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Now, engineering components and science instruments are beginning to stream in from across the country and Europe. Before year's end, most of the flight hardware - including a suite of nine science instruments - is expected to be complete.

The main body of the spacecraft is a giant 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) propulsion module, designed and constructed by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, with help from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and JPL. The module, fitted with electronics, radios, cabling, and the propulsion subsystem, will ship to JPL this spring. Europa Clipper's 10-foot-wide (3-meter-wide) high-gain antenna also will be arriving at the Lab soon.

"We're moving into the phase where we see the pieces all come together as a flight system," said Europa Clipper Project Manager Jan Chodas of JPL. "It will be very exciting to see the hardware, the flight software, and the instruments get integrated and tested. To me, it's the next level of discovery. We'll learn how the system we designed will actually perform."

Europa, which scientists are confident harbors an internal ocean with twice the amount of water in Earth's oceans combined, may currently have conditions suitable for supporting life. Europa Clipper will orbit Jupiter and conduct multiple close flybys of Europa to gather data on the moon's atmosphere, surface, and interior. Its sophisticated payload will investigate everything from the depth and salinity of the ocean to the thickness of the ice crust to the characteristics of potential plumes that may be venting subsurface water into space.

The first science instrument to be completed was delivered to JPL last week by a team at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. The ultraviolet spectrograph, called Europa-UVS, will search above the surface of Europa for signs of plumes. The instrument collects ultraviolet light, then separates the wavelengths of that light to help determine the composition of the moon's surface and gases in the atmosphere.

As each instrument arrives at JPL, it will be integrated with the spacecraft and re-tested. Engineers need to be sure the instruments can communicate with the flight computer, spacecraft software, and the power subsystem.

Once all the components have been integrated to form the large flight system, Europa Clipper will move to JPL's enormous thermal vacuum chamber for testing that simulates the harsh environment of deep space. There also will be intense vibration testing to ensure Europa Clipper can withstand the jostling of launch. Then it's off to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for an October 2024 launch.

For the leaders of this mission, seeing the engineering components come together with the fleet of instruments will be especially moving, knowing how hard their teams have pushed to work through the coronavirus pandemic.

"I don't know how I'll feel, seeing this come together. I suspect it will be somewhat overwhelming," said JPL's Robert Pappalardo, the Europa Clipper project scientist. "It's happening - it's becoming real. It's becoming tangible."

At the same time, the level of difficulty kicks up several notches as the layers of the project merge.

"All of the parallel paths of hardware and software development will start to join together in a way that's very visible to the team," said JPL's Jordan Evans, the deputy project manager. "Everybody's eyes turn toward the integrated system that's coming together, which is exciting."

SwRI-designed ultraviolet instrument to play integral part of Europa Clipper mission
San Antonio TX (SPX) Mar 07 - An ultraviolet spectrograph (UVS) designed and built by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is the first scientific instrument to be delivered for integration onto NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft. Scheduled to launch in 2024 and arrive in the Jovian system by 2030, Europa Clipper will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter's moon Europa and investigate whether it could harbor conditions suitable for life.

Europa-UVS will be one of nine science instruments in the mission payload. The instrument collects ultraviolet light with a telescope and creates images to help determine the composition of Europa's atmospheric gases and surface materials.

Once it arrives, Europa Clipper will orbit Jupiter and ultimately perform repeated close flybys of the icy moon. Previous observations show strong evidence for a subsurface ocean of liquid water that could host conditions favorable for life.

"It has been a huge team effort to get Europa-UVS built, tested and delivered," said Matthew Freeman, project manager for Europa-UVS and a group leader in SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division.

"Europa-UVS is the sixth in a series of SwRI-built ultraviolet spectrographs, and it benefits greatly from the design experience gained by our team from the Juno-UVS instrument, which is currently operating in Jupiter's harsh radiation environment."

SwRI has decades of experience designing and building instruments for space missions. SwRI has provided ultraviolet spectrographs for other spacecraft, including ESA's Rosetta comet orbiter, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the aforementioned Juno spacecraft now orbiting Jupiter, and ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) planned for a 2023 launch to orbit both Jupiter and its moon Ganymede.

In addition to performing atmospheric studies, Europa-UVS will also search for evidence of potential plumes erupting from within Europa.

"Europa-UVS will hunt down potential plumes spewing from Europa's icy surface and study them," said SwRI's Dr. Kurt Retherford, principal investigator for the UVS instrument. "Europa-UVS will search for and characterize plumes in terms of activity and the nature of subsurface water reservoirs. We will study how the plumes behave - when they start, stop and expand outward far into space."

Related Links
Europa Clipper
The million outer planets of a star called Sol

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NASA starts building Europa Clipper to investigate icy, ocean moon of Jupiter
Washington DC (UPI) Mar 3, 2021
NASA has started to assemble the Europa Clipper spacecraft that will probe the icy, scarred surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa, starting in 2030. The agency has been designing and building 10 instruments for the $4.5 billion mission since 2016, and technicians are assembling the parts at NASA's California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA announced Thursday. NASA has tapped SpaceX to launch Europa Clipper from Florida in 2024 aboard the most powerful operational rocket today, the Falc ... read more