Introducing Europa Clipper | NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Introducing Europa Clipper | NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Join team members from NASA’s Europa Clipper mission behind the scenes in a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to learn about the design of this spacecraft that will visit Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. Europa Clipper Project Manager Jordan Evans and Deputy Science Manager Trina Ray explain how scientists’ questions translate into hardware, and they provide an update on the build in JPL’s clean room, pointing out hardware that will connect the spacecraft to the rocket, the main communication antenna, and cameras.

Europa Clipper will explore this icy moon of Jupiter to see if there are conditions suitable for life. 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 Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

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.

More information about Europa can be found here: europa.nasa.gov

Download Europa Clipper Ocean World poster: go.nasa.gov/3Gsjzt5

Viewers also can watch a 24-hour live feed of the spacecraft in the clean room here:   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk0X3Sh2gIE&t=0s

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

Credit: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Duration: 3 minutes, 46 seconds

Release Date: May 2, 2023

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