[Raquel Villanueva] The spacecraft behind me will travel
to Jupiter to study an icy moon.
But first, all the parts have to come together.
Here's how it's done.
[Introduction music]
Before we can go into the clean room,
we've got to gown up.
[Steve Barajas] We need to put on these special garments
for the clean room that we call bunny suits.
And so from head to toe, we need to be covered.
[Jenny Kampmeier] I typically work behind the scenes
and so this is a really special opportunity to get to go in.
I'm here today to help explain what
some of the instruments are, what they do.
It's really incredible to be in here for the first time
to see the spacecraft with my own eyes.
[Raquel] Europa is an icy moon that orbits Jupiter.
Strong evidence suggests there's a global ocean
beneath the surface
and scientists want to find out if it could support life.
[Steve] The spacecraft started in thousands of pieces.
It definitely did not look like this when it first arrived.
[Jenny] The scientific instruments that we have
on board Europa Clipper actually came from institutions
all over the country.
We have several institutions that contributed instruments to
the spacecraft.
[Raquel] Almost 70 people assemble and
test the spacecraft at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory...
systems, mechanical and electrical...
...affectionately known as “the Sparkies.”
[Steve] We started off with the build of the vault.
That's kind of the section
at the top of the spacecraft that you see.
That's what houses all of the electronics,
the really the heart and brains of the spacecraft.
Down below you see the propulsion module.
That was a separate delivery
from our partners at Johns Hopkins University.
And we’ve brought those two
pieces together, and created the spacecraft.
And then after that, we added on the
high-gain antenna, which you see there at the top.
So that's an operation that took well over 8 hours.
[Jenny] This is the thing that is getting our science data
back down to the Earth.
[Steve] We've got our imagers.
Those will be pointing towards Europa as we fly by.
We've got our dust detector and our mass spectrometer,
our plasma detector located up high there.
And it has a twin down below
at the bottom of the spacecraft and our magnetometer located
underneath the high-gain antenna.
[Jenny] We also have a instrument called an
ice-penetrating radar that's gonna help us
look inside the moon and understand its structure.
[Raquel] Getting this massive spacecraft to Jupiter
requires serious power.
These solar arrays will be installed before launch.
They will span about the length of a basketball court.
But first, more testing.
[Steve] It may look stationary, but we're actually in the middle
of something called System Test 2,
and it's actually taking the spacecraft
through the various phases of the mission.
-...command, go ahead and bind again
- Power off [unintelligible] and capture.
- Copy.
[Steve] While it doesn't look like it,
the spacecraft is actually flying through space.
I think actually right now we’re entering orbit around Jupiter.
At the end of the day, we can't forget that
people have to build the spacecraft and test it.
People have put in an incredible amount of effort
to get us to this point
and we know everybody on
the Europa Clipper team is looking to see
this spacecraft succeed.
[Raquel] Stay tuned to see Europa Clipper put to the test
before its mission to Jupiter's icy moon this fall.
[Ending music]