Europa Clipper
NASA's largest planetary spacecraft. Europa Clipper launched in 2024 to study Jupiter's ocean moon Europa. Its giant solar arrays, instruments, flight path and arrival in 2030.
Europa Clipper (model): National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) · Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Public domain
The mission
Europa Clipper is designed to find out whether Europa, a moon of Jupiter, could support life. It launched from Kennedy Space Center on October 14, 2024, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. It is NASA's largest spacecraft ever built for a planetary mission.
A long, looping trip
To gain speed, Clipper flew past Mars in March 2025 and returns past Earth in December 2026 before heading to Jupiter, arriving in April 2030. Rather than orbiting Europa, where radiation is intense, it will orbit Jupiter and swoop past Europa about 49 times, sometimes passing just 25 km above the surface.
What it carries
Clipper carries cameras, an ice-penetrating radar to measure the thickness of the ice shell, a magnetometer to confirm the ocean, a thermal instrument to find warm spots, and mass spectrometers to sniff any plumes or particles thrown off the surface. Its electronics sit in a radiation-shielded vault.
It also carries a vault plate engraved with a poem by US Poet Laureate Ada Limon and waveforms of the word water in more than 100 languages.
Clipper's high-gain antenna is about 3 metres across, and its data will travel the long way home to NASA's Deep Space Network dishes in California, Spain and Australia, which keep in touch with spacecraft across the solar system.
Working with JUICE
ESA's JUICE mission, launched in 2023, will arrive at Jupiter in 2031 and focus on Ganymede. Together, the two spacecraft will give the most complete picture yet of Jupiter's icy moons and their hidden oceans.
How Clipper is protected
Jupiter's radiation belts are among the harshest environments in the solar system. Clipper's sensitive electronics sit inside a vault with walls of aluminium and zinc, designed to slow the damage. Each flyby is short, followed by a long swing away from Jupiter to transmit data and limit radiation exposure. Engineers expect the mission to survive several years of these passes, gathering enough data to judge Europa's habitability.
- Europa Clipper (model): National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) · Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Public domain
Text written by Planetinio.
