A rare look inside the clean room at NASA's Europa Clipper
Go behind the scenes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to see the Europa Clipper spacecraft up close. Before its journey to Jupiter, project manager Jordan Evans provides a tour of the spacecraft and discusses the advanced instruments designed to investigate the habitability of Jupiter's icy moon.
The video offers a glimpse of the spacecraft inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL. This mission, a collaboration between JPL and Johns Hopkins APL, aims to explore Europa, a moon believed to possess an icy crust covering a subsurface ocean containing more water than Earth's oceans combined.
The tour highlights the mission's scientific goals: studying Europa's surface features, confirming the presence of its ocean, and determining its chemical composition. One key instrument, the MASPEX mass spectrometer, acts as the mission's 'nose' to sample and identify gases, potentially even detecting plumes erupting from the moon's interior.
Source: JPL Clean Room Q&A: See the Europa Clipper spacecraft, scheduled to launch in October 2024
