NASA approves mission to search for a hidden ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa

After decades of dreaming of Jupiter’s moon Europa — and the vast ocean that probably lies beneath its icy surface — scientists are now weeks away from sending a spacecraft there. NASA confirmed yesterday that its Europa Clipper mission will launch on schedule, following a scare that it might face significant delays due to possibly faulty transistors that were installed on the US$5-billion spacecraft.
“We are confident that our beautiful spacecraft and capable team are ready for launch operations and our full science mission at Europa,” Laurie Leshin, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said at a 9 September press conference.
With a mass of more than 3.2 tonnes, a height of roughly 5 metres and a width of more than 30 metres with its solar panels fully unfurled, Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft that NASA has ever built for a planetary mission. Yesterday, the mission passed what NASA calls ‘key decision point E’ — the final review hurdle before proceeding towards launch. The spacecraft’s launch window opens on 10 October.
If it takes off successfully next month, the orbiter will arrive at Jupiter in April 2030. Its nine instruments will then investigate both Europa’s icy crust and the ocean that scientists suspect lies beneath it, to determine whether the moon could support life as we know it. Previous missions have suggested that Europa’s icy surface hides a subterranean ocean of brine1 that is estimated to contain more than twice the volume of water in Earth’s oceans. The moon’s fissured, seemingly young surface also implies that the satellite has active geology — hinting that Europa’s interior could be warm and dynamic enough for the complex chemistry of life.
There’s no such thing as a tricorder — a fictional instrument from the Star Trek universe — that we can aim at something to reveal whether it is alive, said Curt Niebur, the Europa Clipper programme scientist at NASA’s headquarters in Washington DC, during the press conference. “It is extremely difficult to be able to detect life, especially from orbit,” he said. “First, we’re going to ask the straightforward question: are the proper ingredients there for life to exist?”
Before the transistor scare, Europa Clipper had already faced setbacks. In 2019, NASA angered scientists by removing a sophisticated magnetometer — intended to collect data such as the salt content of the ocean water — from the spacecraft, citing budget concerns. The mission also endured uncertainty for years over its path to space. That’s because the US Congress had mandated that the spacecraft be launched aboard NASA’s long-delayed Space Launch System rocket. Finally, in 2020, US lawmakers allowed the programme to select the reliable Falcon Heavy rocket from private firm SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, for the launch.

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The possible transistor problem reared its head in May this year when NASA engineers learnt that batches of a certain kind of transistor, similar to those installed on Europa Clipper, were malfunctioning when exposed to lower levels of radiation than expected. The components — called metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETS) — act like switches in electrical circuits and were supplied by Infineon, a hardware manufacturer based in Neubiberg, Germany.
Because Europa Clipper is set to fly past Europa 49 times, coming as close as 25 kilometres above the surface, the spacecraft will also need to fly through a fusillade of charged particles accelerated by Jupiter’s magnetic field, which is roughly 20,000 times as strong as Earth’s. This means that the electronics housed in the orbiter must be able to withstand radiation damage.
In May, NASA said it was examining whether the mission’s transistors risked malfunctioning. The agency launched into four months of 24-hour intensive testing at three facilities: JPL; the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland; and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This was a huge lift, and I think ‘huge lift’ is a huge understatement,” Leshin said.
After evaluating spare MOSFETs from the same batches that were installed on Europa Clipper, NASA found that the spacecraft’s circuits would perform as expected. This conclusion partially rests on the fact that, during the first half of its four-year baseline mission orbiting Jupiter, the spacecraft will be in the worst of Jupiter’s radiation only one out of every 21 days. The rest of the time, the orbiter’s transistors can partially self-heal from radiation damage when gently heated, through a process called annealing.
“While Europa Clipper does dip into the radiation environment, once it comes out, it comes out long enough for those transistors the opportunity to heal and partially recover between fly-bys,” said Jordan Evans, the Europa Clipper project manager at JPL, during the conference. “We can — I have high confidence, and the data bears it out — complete the original mission.”