After a thorough investigation into suspicious transistors on NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft, NASA officials have given the go-ahead to launch the probe next month as planned. The $5.2 billion mission is set to determine whether a suspected subsurface ocean on Jupiter's icy moon Europa is a habitable environment.
The transistor problem occurred in May, raising concerns that Clipper's mission might be shortened or the flight delayed for costly repairs.
However, the research found that the transistors in question will actually repair themselves during the 20 days between high doses of radiation the probe receives during each of its 49 flybys of Europa, all of which take place deep within Jupiter's powerful magnetic field and radiation environment.
Additionally, if necessary, on-board heating elements can be used to increase the temperature of the affected transistors, improving the recovery process.
"After extensive testing and analysis of the transistors, the Europa Clipper project and I personally are confident that we can complete the original mission to explore Europa as planned," said Jordan Evans, project manager for the Europa Clipper project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The solar-powered Europa Clipper, one of NASA's most ambitious planetary probes, is a "flagship" mission designed to make multiple close flybys of Europa to investigate whether a subsurface saltwater ocean beneath the world's frozen icy crust could harbor a habitable environment.
If habitability can be confirmed, "think about what that means: that you have two places in one solar system that have all the ingredients for life and are habitable at the same time," said Curt Niebur, a scientist on NASA's Europa Clipper program.
"Think about what that means if you extrapolate that result to the billions and billions of other solar systems in this galaxy. If we leave aside the question of 'is there life?' on Europa, the question of habitability alone opens up a huge new paradigm for the search for life in the galaxy."
Europa was discovered by Galileo in 1610 and has been studied by NASA's Voyager probes and, more extensively, by the agency's Galileo orbiter in the 1990s, which flew by it a dozen times.
The spacecraft found that Jupiter's magnetic field around Europa was disrupted, suggesting an electrically conductive fluid deep inside the moon. Given Europa's frozen crust, the most likely explanation is a subsurface saltwater ocean kept warm by tidal flexion, the repeated compression by Jupiter's enormous gravity as the moon swings through its orbit.
The Europa Clipper is not designed to search for signs of life on or beneath Europa's crust. But confirming the presence of a hidden sea and determining its habitability would be a major step forward in the search for places in the solar system and beyond where life, as currently defined, might exist.
"This is an epic mission," Niebur said. "It's a chance for us to explore not a world that was habitable billions of years ago, but a world that could be habitable today, right now."
"A chance to do the first exploration of this new kind of world that we've discovered very recently, called an ocean world, which is just completely submerged and covered in an ocean of liquid water, completely unlike anything we've seen before. That's what Europa Clipper and her team are going to reveal for us."
The launch is scheduled for October 10 from the Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. In February, the spacecraft will make its first flyby of Mars. In December 2026, it will use the Red Planet's gravity to fly by Earth once more.
Only then will the Europa Clipper be traveling fast enough to enter deep space on a trajectory to Jupiter. Still, the probe won't reach its destination until April 2030, using its thrusters to enter a first orbit around the giant planet.
Five months later, the first in a series of flybys of several moons is needed to make the first flyby of Europa in the spring of 2031. At least 49 flybys of Europa are planned during two scientific campaigns running until 2034, including passes at an altitude of up to 25 kilometers above the frozen surface of the moon.
The mission was on its way to launch when engineers were alerted in May to a potentially serious problem with transistors used throughout the spacecraft. Similar components had been found to fail at lower than expected radiation doses.
The radiation environment around Jupiter is driven by the planet's massive magnetic field, which traps and accelerates electrically charged particles from the solar wind and the volcanic moon Io. The radiation environment near Europa would kill an unprotected astronaut in a matter of hours.
As a result, Europa's flight computer and other key components are protected in a radiation-hardened "vault." Radiation-hardened components are used throughout the spacecraft. But test data from the manufacturer has shown that similar components failed at lower radiation levels than Europa Clipper will experience.
But after months of testing, engineers concluded that the spacecraft could complete its mission without major modifications.
"We've done extensive testing to validate the transistors on the spacecraft," Evans said. "We've been running tests 24 hours a day for the last four months in multiple locations. We've simulated flight-like conditions to highlight any issues that the transistors might have over the course of our four-year science mission in the various applications that we have on the spacecraft.
"We've put these representative transistors in these environments, irradiated entire circuits to see how the system behaves. ... We've replicated the self-healing of those transistors, or annealing as it's called, by heating them to room temperature while they're, in fact, (outside) of that intense radiation environment as we go around each orbit."
Based on the results, he said: "We are ready for our final launch preparations and assessments. We are ready for Europe."
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