Europa is a moon of Jupiter,
but the surface of Europa is covered with a layer of ice.
We think below that ice layer is a vast ocean of liquid water.
And we think there actually
could be more water there than all of Earth's oceans combined.
In the solar system where we found life,
we found that it seems to require liquid water.
liquid water is an essential component of life, as we know it here on Earth.
And so when we're looking for life beyond the earth,
we look for places that could have liquid water.
And that is really informed our,
our search through the solar system for places to look for life.
And that's made Europa one of the best places to look.
Europa Clipper is a spacecraft which we will send out to the Jupiter system.
It will orbit Jupiter and it'll have about 50 close flybys of Europa.
And on each flyby,
it will observe the moon with its suite of scientific instruments.
And these include things like cameras, but also there's a radar instrument
which will be able to measure not just the surface of Europa,
but actually be able to sound into the interior.
It might even be able to tell us how thick that surface ice layer is
and where the ocean begins.
And there will also be a variety
of compositional instruments that will tell us something about
the chemical makeup of Europa Surface, as well as the temperature of its surface.
And there's even instruments that will be able to capture
some of the particles that are ejected from the surface of Europa into space.
Those can be ingested
by instruments on board the spacecraft to measure their composition directly.
So if you were a human standing on the surface of Europa,
you would get fried by radiation very quickly.
And the same radiation also affects the sensitive electronics on a spacecraft.
And so it turns out that if we had put Europa Clipper into orbit
around Europa, it could only survive there for about a month.
Instead, we chose to put Europa Clipper in orbit
around Jupiter with these multiple close flybys of Europa.
And so what that does is it
maximizes our time collecting science during the close flyby.
But then we get out of there on this long orbit, we get out of this
high radiation zone into a location that's a bit safer, a place
that has much lower radiation and in the safer environment,
we can downlink the data that the spacecraft took to Earth.
We can uplink new commands.
We can get ready for the next flyby.
I was fortunate enough to get to look at some of the first images of Europa
that were taken at high resolution by the Galileo spacecraft back in the 1990s,
and I've now been waiting for 25 years for new pictures of Europa,
and I just can't wait.
I've got to wait another six years until we get there,
and then another couple of years before we have our first close flyby.
But I just I'm going to be holding my breath, waiting to see those new
pictures, those new high resolution observations of the surface of Europa.
Right now, we're, getting
ready for some, guidance, navigation control system, functional tests.
And so what we do with
this is we put the spacecraft in the mode as it's flying in space.
And, we insert simulations where necessary to let the system get
the right kinds of inputs to react to, and then it just goes through its paces
and interacts with the software and with the other controllers on board.
We have the sensors to tell where we're pointed, where we are,
and then we have the actuators that make us move in different directions,
and making sure all of those work together in the right directions.
So if you're a basketball fan, so that point of reference is the with
the solar arrays installed and fully deployed,
it would reach almost end to end on a basketball court.
if you compare it to Statue of Liberty and set it up at the right,
the at the feet of the statue, it reaches up to about the, crown.
it's a very large,
very large, spacecraft with the, arrays installed and fully deployed.
They're nicknamed bunny suits, and for obvious reasons.
And, they're we have to gone up that way to control,
the possibility of contamination of the spacecraft.
We have instruments on board.
They're sensitive to particular contamination.
We have other instruments that are sensitive to molecular contamination.
And then we have the planetary protection
requirements that we have to meet in order to be operating near Europa.
So all of those require us to cover.
Humans are notoriously dirty
in terms of in terms of all of these factors.
And so we'll cover up as much as possible, contain any skin cells, hair,
anything else
that might be coming off of us contain, or all of those inside of those suits.
And it makes it for a pretty uncomfortable working environment for the people
working on the floor.
So over the next few
weeks, we'll be getting the spacecraft ready to ship out to Kennedy Space Center.
One of the main things that you'll see that we do
is we remove the high gain antenna from the spacecraft.
to fit it into the shipping container.
we get everything, we finalize all the blanketing do.
There's the last few tests that we want to do before we ship it out.
but, then everything gets,
ready to install it into the shipping container.
it'll be much like you see it now behind me.
It'll be mounted horizontally in the shipping container.
And it's container that sized to just fit into a C-17 aircraft.
And so the Air Force will,
we'll do NASA, the service of flying the spacecraft out to Kennedy.
I am excited to be part of a fantastic team.
from the early days of the mission up through now,
it's been a wonderful group of people to work with at JPL, at APL,
at the different institutions that provided the, the, the, instruments,
Airbus Netherlands, who provided the solar arrays,
working with these kinds of teams is, is gratifying, energizing.
very exciting.
And then obviously, once we get to Europa and start getting science back,
revolutionizing what we know about Europa and what it adds to our knowledge of
the solar system is going to be the icing on the cake.