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NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft efficiently examined its ice-penetrating radar system throughout a detailed flyby of Mars earlier this 12 months, proving that the probe is prepared for its principal mission: peering beneath the frozen crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa to seek for indicators of subsurface liquid water and probably even decide if these oceans have the elements to kind and maintain life.
Launched in October 2024, Europa Clipper is on a 1.8-billion-mile (2.9-billion-kilometer) journey to review Jupiter and its moons. On March 1, it flew inside 550 miles (884 kilometers) of Mars’ floor in a deliberate gravity help maneuver to fine-tune its trajectory.
The flyby additionally offered a helpful alternative to check Clipper’s two onboard scientific devices in deep house circumstances, together with its radar system, often known as REASON (brief for Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface). The instrument efficiently despatched and acquired indicators that bounced off the volcanic plains of Mars “without a hitch,” in accordance with a NASA statement. The 40-minute radar check produced roughly 60 gigabytes of information, confirming that the system is performing as meant and prepared for its main mission at Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, the assertion learn.
“We got everything out of the flyby that we dreamed,” Don Blankenship, a analysis professor on the University of Texas at Austin who serves because the principal investigator for the REASON instrument, stated within the assertion. “The goal was to determine the radar’s readiness for the Europa mission, and it worked. Every part of the instrument proved itself to do exactly what we intended.”
REASON is designed to have a look inside Europa primarily by transmitting radio waves that replicate off buildings inside the underlying ice, in accordance with NASA.
The radar makes use of two pairs of slender antennas mounted on Europa Clipper’s huge photo voltaic arrays to transmit and obtain indicators. The antennas span roughly 58 ft (17.6 meters), whereas the photo voltaic arrays to which they’re connected are the scale of a basketball courtroom, designed to seize as a lot daylight as doable in Europa’s dim setting, the place daylight is just about 1/twenty fifth as robust as it’s on Earth.
While engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) performed in depth prototype testing outdoor utilizing towers on a hilltop above the lab, the ultimate flight {hardware} needed to be saved sterile and examined indoors — limiting full-scale trials. A correct echo check of the absolutely built-in system would have required a chamber no less than 250 ft (76 meters) lengthy, practically the size of a soccer subject, the assertion learn.
That made the Mars flyby the primary alternative to check the radar system in its full, operational kind in house.
“All of us who had labored so laborious to make this check occur — and the scientists seeing the info for the primary time — have been ecstatic, saying, ‘Oh, take a look at this! Oh, take a look at that!’ Trina Ray, the deputy science supervisor for Europa Clipper at JPL, stated within the assertion.
The spacecraft is at present about 280 million miles (450 million kilometers) from Earth and is about to obtain one other gravity help — this time because it whips round Earth — in December 2026. It is anticipated to reach within the Jupiter system in 2030, the place it is going to start a 40-flyby mission of Europa.
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