- 4555 - JUPITER'S MOON EUROPA - mission launch in 2024? - After decades of dreaming of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the vast ocean that probably lies beneath its icy surface, scientists are now weeks away from sending a spacecraft there. NASA confirmed that its “Europa Clipper” mission will launch on schedule, following a scare that it might have to be significantly delayed owing to possibly faulty transistors installed on the $5-billion spacecraft.
--------------- 4555
- JUPITER'S MOON
EUROPA - mission launch in 2024?
-
- Launch is at October 10, 2024.
-
- With a mass of more than 3.2 tons, a height
of roughly 5 meters, and a width of more than 30 meters with its solar panels
fully unfurled, “Europa Clipper” is the largest spacecraft that NASA has ever
built for a planetary mission.
-
- If it takes off successfully the orbiter
will arrive at Jupiter in April, 2030. Its nine instruments will then
investigate both Europa’s icy crust and the ocean that scientists suspect lies
beneath it, to determine whether the moon could support life as we know it.
-
- Previous missions have suggested that
Europa’s icy surface hides a subterranean ocean of brine with more than twice
the volume of water in Earth’s oceans. The moon’s fissured, seemingly young
surface also implies that the satellite has active geology, hinting that
Europa’s interior could be warm and dynamic enough for the complex chemistry of
life.
-
- Are the proper ingredients there for life
to exist?” Violent volcanoes have
wracked Jupiter’s moon “Ioz' for billions of years.
-
- Because Europa Clipper is set to fly past
Europa 49 times, at distances as close as 25 kilometers, the spacecraft will
also need to fly through a fusillade of charged particles accelerated by
Jupiter’s magnetic field, which is roughly 20,000 times as strong as Earth’s.
This means that the electronics housed in the orbiter must resist radiation
damage.
-
- But in May NASA said it was examining
whether the mission’s transistors risked malfunctioning. The agency launched
into four months of 24-hour intensive testing at three different facilities:
JPL; the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland; and the
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
-
- After evaluating spare MOSFETs from the same
batches that were installed on Europa Clipper, NASA found that the spacecraft’s
circuits would perform as expected. This conclusion partially rests on the fact
that during the first half of its four-year baseline mission orbiting Jupiter,
the spacecraft will be in the worst of Jupiter’s radiation only one out of
every 21 days. The rest of the time, the orbiter’s transistors can partially
self-heal from radiation damage when gently heated, via a process called “annealing”.
-
- While Europa Clipper does dip into the
radiation environment, once it comes out, it comes out long enough for those
transistors the opportunity to heal and partially recover between flybys.
-
-
September 16, 2024 JUPITER'S MOON
EUROPA - mission launch in 2024? 4555
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------- Comments appreciated and Pass it on to
whomever is interested. ---
--- Some reviews are at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
-- email feedback, corrections, request for
copies or Index of all reviews
--- to:
------
jamesdetrick@comcast.net
------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
--------------------- --- Monday, September 16,
2024
---------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment