From October 10, 2024, the American probe Europa Clipper is scheduled to be launched towards Europa – one of Jupiter’s many moons – to find out if its underground ocean can support life. With a wingspan of 30.5 meters, it is the largest planetary exploration vessel ever designed by NASA.
Conceived more than twenty years ago, the Europa Clipper mission is finally reaching the end of its preparations. During the month of August, two immense solar panels were integrated into the six-ton space probe, before being subjected to a battery of tests. These structures are so large – each measuring 14.2 meters long and 4.1 meters wide – that they could only be unfolded one after the other in the clean room of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, from which Europa Clipper is scheduled to take off from October 10.
Objective: to reach Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, to study the gigantic reservoir of liquid water that it contains. satellite naturel contains beneath its icy crust. And to determine, at the end of this ambitious $5 billion mission – one of the most expensive in NASA history – whether this underground ocean could allow the emergence and development of life!
Photograph of one of the two solar panels of Europa Clipper taken on August 21, 2024 in the white room of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA
Longer than a basketball court
At the time of liftoff, Europa Clipper’s solar panels will be folded up so that the massive craft can be installed in the fairing of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launcher. They will only be deployed “90 minutes later“, NASA specifies, once the probe is travelling freely in space, this sequence itself lasting around forty minutes.
It will then measure 30.5 meters in wingspan, more than the length of a professional basketball court, making Europa Clipper “NASA’s largest spacecraft ever built for a planetary exploration mission“, underlines the American space agency.
Photograph of Europa Clipper with its two solar panels folded. Credit: NASA
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- sciencesetavenir.fr