The Europa Clipper is Coming Together, Launching in 2024 - By Nancy_A
Since the mission passed reviews last year, the assembly of the spacecraft is taking place in clean rooms at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with components and science instruments arriving from across the US and Europe. Before year’s end, most of the flight hardware is expected to be complete.
When fully assembled, Europa Clipper will be as large as an SUV with solar arrays long enough to span a basketball court. The propulsion module, the main body of the spacecraft is 3 meters tall, and it’s equally large high-gain antenna is the same size. The first science instrument to be completed was delivered to JPL last week by a team at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. The ultraviolet spectrograph, called Europa-UVS, will search above the surface of Europa for signs of plumes. The instrument collects ultraviolet light, then separates the wavelengths of that light to help determine the composition of the moon’s surface and gases in the atmosphere.
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