NASA's Europa Clipper Spacecraft: Instrument Integration | JPL

NASA's Europa Clipper Spacecraft: Instrument Integration | JPL

Hardware for NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft was developed at institutions and facilities across the U.S. and Europe, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This work included the science instruments and other spacecraft components, such as the propulsion module, radio frequency module, solar arrays, electronics vault, and more.

Download Europa Clipper Ocean World poster:

go.nasa.gov/3Gsjzt5

During the assembly, test, and launch operations phase of the mission, engineers put together the spacecraft, test its components, and prepare it for its launch and journey to Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa.

In this video, spacecraft assembly, test, and launch operations mechanical engineer Steve Barajas and science systems engineer Jenny Kampmeier provide a behind-the-scenes look at the nearly completed spacecraft in the High Bay 1 clean room at JPL. 

The propulsion module for the spacecraft was built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, with help from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and JPL. 

The science instruments were developed by APL, the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, JPL, UCLA, University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Missions such as Europa Clipper contribute to the field of astrobiology, the interdisciplinary research on the variables and conditions of distant worlds that could harbor life as we know it. While Europa Clipper is not a life-detection mission, it will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Europa and investigate whether the icy moon, with its subsurface ocean, has the capability to support life. 

Understanding Europa’s habitability will help scientists better understand how life developed on Earth and the potential for finding life beyond our planet. The spacecraft needs to be hardy enough to survive a 1.6 billion-mile, six-year journey to Jupiter—and sophisticated enough to perform a detailed science investigation of Europa once it arrives at the Jupiter system in 2030.

Europa Clipper is expected to launch in October 2024 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with APL 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.

For more information on the mission go to: https://europa.nasa.gov/

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Duration: 3 minutes, 32 seconds

Release Date: March 6, 2024

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