Tim Larson is JPL deputy project manager for Europa Clipper: The main body will include a fuel tank and an oxidizer tank connecting to an array of 24 engines. Stretch all that wiring out and you get 640 meters, taking us twice around a football field. Credit: NASA.Įight antennas are involved, powered by a radio frequency subsystem that will service a high-gain antenna measuring three meters wide, and as JPL notes in a recent update, the electrical wires and connectors collectively called the ‘harness’ themselves weigh 68 kilograms.
Here it is being unwrapped in a main clean room at JPL, as engineers and technicians inspect it just after delivery in early June 2022. Image: The main body of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft has been delivered to the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where, over the next two years, engineers and technicians will finish assembling the craft by hand before testing it to make sure it can withstand the journey to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Extending the solar arrays and other deployable equipment takes it up to basketball court size. In Europa Clipper’s case, the recently delivered main body is 3 meters tall and 1.5 meters wide. It’s about the size of an SUV when stowed for launch, but we know from the James Webb Space Telescope how large these things can become when fully deployed. Here I fall back on the specs to note that this is the largest NASA spacecraft ever designed for exploration of another planet. Not that the spacecraft is by any means complete, but its main body has been delivered to the Pasadena site, where it will see final assembly and testing over a two-year period. For me, though, the old-fashioned ‘sense of wonder’ kicks in long and hard, as it did when Europa Clipper arrived recently at JPL. I suppose the people who do these things at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory itself get used to the feeling. But seeing the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on the ground at JPL just before their shipment to Florida was an experience that has stayed with me, as I pondered how something built by human hands would soon be exploring another world. I get an eerie feeling when I look at spacecraft before they launch (not that I get many opportunities to do that, at least in person).