NASA - Europa Clipper updates and discussion

[LouScheffer]

This now makes 6 instruments at least in the same building/room as Clipper and 4 being built.  MISE seems to be the last optical instrument, the gravity experiment likely to be installed same time as the high gain antenna, and I presume the magnetometer and radar are complicated by their deployment needs (especially the latter).  Has there been any word on any instrument lagging?

The gravity experiment uses the normal coherent spacecraft transponder, and nothing else.  Likely this is exactly the same transponder used on many other missions.  It's probably already installed as part of the base spacecraft, but in any case it should present very little schedule risk.

[Targeteer]

https://europa.nasa.gov/resources/394/nasa-europa-clipper-solar-arrays-assembly/?fbclid=IwAR0mVYaupMXJzqiSzZeI3NUrkEsl_f9Vc1dVHr2qNKubZghjci6loB4NM60

 NASA Europa Clipper Solar Arrays Assembly
The spacecraft’s large solar array wings take up the majority of this image. They are parallel to each other in position and the image is taken at angle, so you can see the solar arrays extended into the background of the image. Each solar array wing consists of five panels connected to each other to form a long solar array wing that is approximately 46.5 feet (14.2 meters) long. Bronze colored lines are visible creating a grid pattern on each panel. Each solar array wing is hoisted several feet above the ground by support structures that attach to each solar array wing panel. The solar array wings are tall with an approximate height of 13.5 feet (4.1 meters). Walking between the solar array wings is an engineer wearing blue protective clothing. The engineer doesn’t even appear to come up to half the height of the solar array wings. The solar array wings are visible in a large white cleanroom, and the area with the wings is cordoned off with a red barrier.
Source: NASA/Airbus Defence and Space Netherlands
Published: January 17, 2023

This image shows the solar array “wings” for NASA’s Europa Clipper in the cleanroom of Airbus in Leiden, the Netherlands, where the solar array wings are being assembled.

Massive solar arrays will collect enough sunlight for the spacecraft’s power needs as it operates in the Jupiter system, which is more than five times as far from the Sun as Earth. Each wing is approximately 46.5 feet (14.2 meters) long and approximately 13.5 feet (4.1 meters) high. With its arrays deployed, the spacecraft spans more than 100 feet (30.5 meters), or about the length of a basketball court. The solar array wings will be integrated onto the spacecraft leading up to the spacecraft’s launch. Learn more about the spacecraft here.

Scientists believe the icy moon Europa harbors a vast internal ocean that may have conditions suitable for supporting life. Europa Clipper will fly by the moon about 50 times while its suite of science instruments gathers data on the moon’s atmosphere, surface, and interior – information that will help scientists learn more about the ocean, the ice crust, and potential plumes that may be venting subsurface water into space.

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NASA Europa Clipper Solar Arrays Assembly


NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft will conduct a detailed survey of Jupiter's moon Europa to determine whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life. Europa Clipper will carry an advanced suite of science instruments to discover whether Europa hosts environments suitable for life.

Meet the spacecraft ›
Page Updated: January 17, 2023

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/ltelkins/status/1625647677412372482

Look at that gorgeous @EuropaClipper! Nadir deck w instruments installed. Go, @RPappalardo and team! #PI_Daily

[russianhalo117]

Europa Clipper JPL Cleanroom live feed:

https://www.youtube.com/live/nJ_D9o3Yems?feature=share

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1630299208640069633

Europa Clipper has been moved to the vertical position at NASA JPL!

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/nasajpl/status/1631420639310675968

What's it look like to build a spacecraft? 🛠

Assembly for @EuropaClipper is underway in a clean room at JPL, and you can see what’s happening 24/7! Set to launch in 2024, the mission will investigate the habitability of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon. https://bit.ly/clippercam

[redliox]

According to their twitter the team's adding the narrow angle camera:
https://twitter.com/EuropaClipper/status/1646192230582087681
Figured to mention this given JUICE and Juno bringing Jupiter back into the limelight recently.

[Targeteer]

Similar to previous post with other info

https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/230412-nasa-europa-clipper-gets-its-narrow-angle-camera


Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Johns Hopkins APL Sends Europa Clipper Its Narrow-Angle Camera

News Releases
Europa Imaging System Narrow-Angle Camera

The Europa Imaging System Narrow-Angle Camera (NAC) will allow NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to capture views of Jupiter’s moon Europa in unparalleled detail, bringing us nearer to answering the question of whether the icy moon can potentially harbor life.

Credit: Johns Hopkins APL/Craig Weiman
Wed, 04/12/2023 - 10:01

After years of work to design, build and run tests, scientists and engineers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, bid farewell to the Europa Imaging System (EIS) Narrow-Angle Camera (NAC) for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The instrument departed APL’s campus on March 31 for a cross-country trip to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. It safely arrived April 3 in the morning.

The delivery of the NAC marks the latest in the long list of space instruments APL has built over the last 70 years and the last of its instrument deliveries to Europa Clipper. The other components built for Europa Clipper arrived in California last summer and fall, including its propulsion module — the backbone of the spacecraft — its radio frequency module, the spacecraft electrical harness, the Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding (PIMS) instrument, the EIS Wide-Angle Camera (WAC) and major assemblies of the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE) instrument.

“APL’s two Europa Clipper cameras are going to provide humanity a front-row seat as we explore the habitability of this mysterious ocean world,” said Bobby Braun, head of the Space Exploration Sector at APL. “A huge congratulations is due to the Narrow-Angle Camera team on completion of this first-of-a-kind instrument that will undoubtedly rewrite the books on our solar system’s ocean worlds. I’m so proud of the amazing members of this team who worked through myriad challenges to achieve this historic delivery.”

Slated to launch in October 2024, Europa Clipper is NASA’s largest planetary spacecraft, stretching more than 100 feet (30.5 meters) with its solar arrays deployed. It will perform nearly 50 flybys of Europa, a moon of Jupiter that almost certainly has a liquid-water ocean beneath its icy surface and very well may have all the ingredients needed for life to exist. Part of Europa Clipper’s mission is to validate those hypotheses, and doing so requires a detailed study of the surface through images.

Multiple missions have already imaged Europa, including NASA’s Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Galileo and Juno spacecraft, which returned photos of pits, knobs, craters, crisscrossing faults and frozen ice blocks. But together they’ve captured only about 15% of the surface at even moderate resolution, and very little of it in color or stereo, said APL planetary scientist Zibi Turtle, principal investigator of EIS.

The NAC is one half of EIS, providing high-resolution images of Europa’s surface while its wide-angle counterpart provides images covering a broader area. A reflecting telescope, the NAC imager uses a large mirror to direct light through a series of other mirrors and lenses onto an 8-megapixel sensor analogous to those found in today’s digital cameras and cell phones. The camera is designed to take high-resolution images focused on small portions of the landscape at as good as 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) per pixel. No icy satellite has been imaged at resolutions this fine from orbit before.

Those images will feed into a broader effort to study the many geologic features on Europa’s fractured surface. By examining the structures in detail, researchers hope to uncover past, recent or even ongoing geologic processes that formed Europa’s dynamic surface and link the features to one another to better decipher the processes happening under the surface.

“The better we understand the landforms, the better we can put constraints on the structure of the interior and whether material can be transported through the ice shell between the ocean and the surface,” Turtle said.

The NAC will also provide the necessary global-scale imaging for identifying surface deposits where plumes of water vapor may have vented (or still be venting) from the ocean below, as well as searching for direct evidence of active plumes. If present, they would indicate an important exchange between the surface and subsurface, Turtle explained. To date, however, the evidence for plumes remains ambiguous.

In California, the team will run the NAC through an additional series of tests. The camera will then be assembled into its final configuration on Europa Clipper for physical and environmental testing with the other instruments and spacecraft parts.

   

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/europaclipper/status/1653468281175674881

It's one of the most ambitious missions NASA has undertaken: investigating Jupiter's mysterious ocean moon Europa to see whether it has the conditions to support life. Come behind the scenes as we prepare for launch next year. europa.nasa.gov

[redliox]

There might be progress happening with the magnetometer.

https://twitter.com/EuropaClipper/status/1662232825171677186

[jacqmans]

June 01, 2023
RELEASE 23-060

NASA Invites Public to Sign Poem That Will Fly Aboard Europa Clipper

Members of the public are invited to add their names to an original poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission before the spacecraft begins its journey to Jupiter’s moon Europa in October 2024. The poem and the names will be like a message in a bottle, traveling billions of miles as the mission investigates whether the ocean thought to lie beneath Europa’s icy crust could support life.

As part of the “Message in a Bottle” campaign, names received before 11:59 p.m. EST, Dec. 31, 2023, will be stenciled onto a microchip, along with the poem, written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and titled "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa."

To sign, read the poem, and hear Limón recite the poem in an animated video, go to:

https://go.nasa.gov/MessageInABottle

The site also enables participants to create and download a customizable souvenir – an illustration of your name on a message in a bottle against a rendering of Europa and Jupiter – to commemorate the experience. Participants are encouraged to share their enthusiasm on social media using the hashtag #SendYourName.

“‘Message in a Bottle’ is the perfect convergence of science, art, and technology, and we are excited to share with the world the opportunity to be a part of Europa Clipper’s journey,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “I just love the thought that our names will be traveling across our solar system aboard the radiation-tolerant spacecraft that seeks to unlock the secrets of Jupiter’s frozen moon.”

The “Message in a Bottle” campaign is similar to other NASA projects that have enabled tens of millions of people to send their names to ride along with Artemis I and several Mars spacecraft. It draws from the agency’s long tradition of shipping inspirational messages on spacecraft that have explored our solar system and beyond. In the vein of NASA’s Voyagers’ Golden Record, which sent a time capsule of sounds and images to communicate the diversity of life and culture on Earth, the program aims to spark the imagination of people around the world.

“Inspiration is what fueled the people who developed this flagship mission and who hand-crafted the largest spacecraft NASA has sent to explore the solar system. It’s what drives humanity to ask the big questions that this mission will contribute to,” said Laurie Leshin, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which leads the development of Europa Clipper. “Inspiration is riding along with every single name that will be making the journey to Europa.”

Europa Clipper currently is being assembled, on camera, at JPL. Set to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to reach the Jupiter system, where it will arrive in 2030. As it orbits Jupiter and flie s by Europa about 50 times, it will log another half-billion miles (800,000 kilometers) while a suite of science instruments gathers data on the subsurface ocean, the ice crust, and the moon’s atmosphere.

In January, Limón visited JPL to see the spacecraft and learn more about the mission. She was appointed 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in 2022 and reappointed for a second, two-year term in April 2023. Limón was born in Sonoma, California, and is of Mexican ancestry. She is the author of several poetry collections, including “The Hurting Kind” and “The Carrying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

The Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center is the home of the nation’s official poet, the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry – a position that has existed since 1937. The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States – and extensive materials from around the world – both on site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and home of the U.S. Copyright Office.

More About the Mission

Europa Clipper’s main science goal is to determine whether there are places below the surface of Europa that could support life. The mission’s three main science objectives are to understand the nature of the ice shell and the ocean beneath it, along with the moon’s composition and geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.

Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL designed the main spacecraft body in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.

More information about Europa can be found here:

https://www.nasa.gov/europa

[Blackstar]

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Vogon_poetry

[redliox]

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Vogon_poetry

We ought to get Marvin's opinion 

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/rpappalardo/status/1668687653016055808

We have a spacecraft! The @EuropaClipper avionics and propulsion modules are now united into one beautiful spacecraft that will fly to Europa! 🚀 🛰️ 💫💧
#PI_Daily

[redliox]

Will they begin assembling the structure on a more permanent basis now?

[ajmarco]

Europa Clipper JPL Cleanroom live feed:

https://www.youtube.com/live/nJ_D9o3Yems?feature=share

Updated Cleanroom feed link:

https://www.youtube.com/live/yk0X3Sh2gIE?feature=share

[Blackstar]

I'm at JPL today. Stopped in to see Clipper, took some photos:

[FutureSpaceTourist]

twitter.com/rpappalardo/status/1682083298053591041

I spy ... MISE! 🤩 And now it's installed on @EuropaClipper!  Here's the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa in @NASAJPL High Bay 1, just before its installation onto the spacecraft. All Europa instruments are now delivered, except the radar antennas (coming soon!). #PI_Daily

https://twitter.com/rpappalardo/status/1681118173037481984

What a day, getting up close and personal in the clean room with @EuropaClipper! #PI_Daily

[Blackstar]

I took a photo of Clipper last week Tuesday and it was on its side. They have moved it and rotated it to vertical (I think). This is current.

[Targeteer]

https://europa.nasa.gov/mission-updates/92/europa-clippers-magnetometer-testing-is-complete-ready-for-integration/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=spacecraft_makers&utm_content=jpl


Mission Updates | August 9, 2023
Europa Clipper's Magnetometer Testing is Complete, Ready for Integration

Written by Dr. Corey Cochrane, Europa Clipper Magnetometer Calibration Lead & Investigation Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Europa Clipper Magnetometer (ECM), designed and built in a collaborative effort between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the University of California, Los Angeles, has completed its rigorous testing and calibration at JPL and is ready for integration onto the Europa Clipper spacecraft.

The ECM instrument is composed of three fluxgate magnetic field sensors on a 28-foot (8.5-meter) boom. The sensors are strategically placed to enable the team to identify and remove from their measurements the contributions of magnetic fields originating from the spacecraft. The sensors are connected through long harnesses to an electronics unit that is housed inside the spacecraft’s protective vault.

ECM will measure the ambient magnetic field in the vicinity of Europa, but the instrument team will require sophisticated algorithms to untangle the various sources of magnetic field. Europa is surrounded by plasma, consisting of ionized particles mainly sourced from neighboring moon Io. The plasma carries electrical currents that contribute magnetic noise to the measurements.

To understand the external sources of the magnetic field, the investigation will use the plasma environment measurements made by the Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding (PIMS), an instrument developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Those measurements will help the team identify the contributions of Jupiter's dominant magnetic field as modified by magnetospheric plasma, Europa’s ionosphere, the induced magnetic field originating from Europa's subsurface ocean, and the spacecraft’s magnetic field. Using data from both instruments, scientists will be able to better isolate the induced response of Europa’s subsurface ocean and, thus, to better constrain its properties.
Several workers in white lab coats, cleanroom bouffant caps, and blue face masks work around Europa Clipper’s magnetometer boom after the boom was unfurled. Some of the workers are on the floor beneath the boom. Others are standing nearby. The boom is covered in protective silver-colored material and is supported by several aluminum-colored stands.
Europa Clipper’s 28-foot (8.5-meter) magnetometer boom is unfurled at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The magnetic field measurements will give scientists estimates of both the thickness and conductivity of Europa's subsurface ocean and the thickness of the ice shell. In combination with compositional data from other Europa Clipper instruments, understanding the conductivity will tell us how salty Europa’s ocean is - which will help scientists determine if the ocean could be habitable.

After the launch of Europa Clipper in October 2024, ECM scientists will routinely calibrate the instrument’s sensors using data from the solar wind. An additional calibration opportunity will take place during the Earth flyby gravity assist maneuver, currently planned in December 2026. This flyby will allow ECM scientists to compare the measurements made by ECM to those made by other magnetometers on spacecraft in Earth’s orbit, thus providing a convenient way to calibrate the instrument. The ECM sensors will also be used for a meticulous magnetic characterization campaign of the spacecraft and its subsystems during its five-and-a-half year cruise to the Jovian system. Additional instrument calibration will happen once the spacecraft reaches the Jovian system.