NASA's Europa Clipper Spacecraft: Solar Array Testing | Kennedy Space Center

NASA's Europa Clipper Spacecraft: Solar Array Testing | Kennedy Space Center

Technicians tested deploying a set of massive solar arrays measuring about 46.5 feet (14.2 meters) long and about 13.5 feet (4.1 meters) high for NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft inside the agency’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024. Once launched to study Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, the solar arrays will fully extend to power the spacecraft to perform flybys to gather science and data to determine if the moon can support habitable conditions. 

Europa Clipper—the agency’s largest spacecraft ever developed for a planetary mission—will span a total length of more than 100 feet and weigh 7,145 pounds without the inclusion of propellants. Europa Clipper is expected to launch to planet Jupiter in October 2024 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft needs 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.

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.

Download Europa Clipper Ocean World poster:

https://europa.nasa.gov/resources/173/europa-clipper-journey-to-an-ocean-world-poster/

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.

NASA's Europa Clipper Mission website: 

https://europa.nasa.gov/

Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Image Date: Aug. 7, 2024

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