NASA’s Europa Clipper probe checked out its radar as the spacecraft hurtled past Mars on the way to Jupiter’s moon Europa.
The Mars flyby in March was primarily to use the planet’s gravitational pull to tweak the Europa Clipper’s trajectory. However, boffins were able to use the proximity of the planet to calibrate the spacecraft’s infrared camera and test its radar ahead of its arrival at Europa in 2030, NASA has confirmed.
Engineers were unable to test the flight version of the radar instrument on Earth. Engineering models were tested outside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, but the flight hardware needed to be kept sterile so could only be tested in a clean room.
NASA has access to some enormous clean rooms, and the spacecraft was assembled and tested in the giant High Bay 1 clean room at JPL. However, there wasn’t sufficient space to test the fully assembled radar. According to NASA, a chamber about 250 feet (76 meters) long would have been needed to test the “echo” or bounceback of the instrument’s signals.
The radar, REASON (Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface), employs two pairs of antennas that stick out from the enormous solar arrays of the Europa Clipper. Since scientists have been studying the Martian terrain for decades, and the vehicle would be whizzing past, it seemed a good place to perform a dry run of the instrument and shake out any bugs before the spacecraft arrives at Europa.
The spacecraft bounced radio waves off Mars as it flew by the planet, starting at 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) down to 550 miles (884 kilometers) above the surface. Sixty gigabytes of data were collected, which started downloading to Earth in mid-May.
When the spacecraft gets to Europa, the instrument will operate as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers) from the moon’s surface.
According to NASA, the test was a success. JPL’s Trina Ray, Europa Clipper Deputy Science Manager, said: “The engineers were excited that their test worked so perfectly.”
“The scientists seeing the data for the first time were ecstatic. Now, the science team is getting a head start on learning how to process the data and understand the instrument’s behavior compared to models.
“They are exercising those muscles just like they will out at Europa.”
Europa Clipper, the largest spacecraft NASA has ever created for a planetary mission, was launched in October 2024 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. As well as the March flyby of Mars, it will also take a gravity assist from Earth in 2026 before arriving in the Jupiter system in 2030.
While the radar has been tested, engineers still have a nervous wait to see how the spacecraft’s electronics will react to the harsh radiation environment of Jupiter. There is a possibility that some of the parts might fail, although NASA believes the affected transistors will be able to “support the baseline mission.”
Once at Europa, the spacecraft’s three main objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell, investigate its composition, and characterize its structure or physical properties. ®
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