The addition of a high-gain antenna will enable the agency’s Europa Clipper spacecraft – set to launch in October 2024 – to communicate with mission controllers hundreds of millions of miles away. NASA’s Europa Clipper is designed to seek out conditions suitable for life on an ice-covered moon of
“The antenna has successfully completed all of its stand-alone testing,” said Matthew Bray a few days before the antenna was installed. “As the spacecraft completes its final testing, radio signals will be looped back through the antenna via a special cap, verifying that the telecom signal paths are functional.”
Watch as Europa Clipper team members lift and install the spacecraft’s large, dish-shaped high-gain antenna in the main clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credit: NASA/Just over the past year, he’s seen the antenna crisscross the country in the lead-up to the installation. Its ability to beam data precisely was tested twice in 2022 at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
Clipper will bounce ice-penetrating radar off the subsurface ocean to determine its depth, as well as the thickness of the ice crust above it. A magnetometer will measure the moon’s magnetic field to confirm the deep ocean’s existence and the thickness of the ice. On site at JPL for the antenna installation was Simmie Berman, the radio frequency module manager at APL. Like Bray, she began her work on the antenna in 2014. The radio frequency module includes the spacecraft’s entire telecommunications subsystem and a total of seven antennas, the high-gain among them. Her job during installation was to ensure the antenna was properly mounted to the spacecraft and that the components are correctly oriented and well integrated.
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