This May, engineers working on NASA’s Europa Clipper had to deliver the kind of news that no one wants to announce: There was a problem with the transistors on their spacecraft. Europa Clipper is heading to the moon of the same name, which orbits around Jupiter — and that giant planet has an intense environment of radiation around it that is hostile to electronics. Engineers were concerned that some of the transistors may be damaged by that radiation, potentially shortening the life of the spacecraft.
Engineers told The New York Times of reacting to the issue with a “howl of terror.” They worked on the problem throughout the summer, scrambling to figure out how many transistors would be affected and what impact that could have on the spacecraft and its mission. With launch date quickly approaching, they had only a short window to work in.
Now, though, the team is confident that the spacecraft can function as intended. The transistors can be healed by heating them up, using a process called annealing that rearranges the atoms in the transistor and keeps it working. It’s not a solution forever, but it should work long enough for the spacecraft to carry out its four-year mission.
In a news conference this week, NASA officials said they were ready for launch next month and described all of the testing and preparation work they had done ahead of the launch date.
“There’s been extensive testing at JPL [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory], at APU [Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory], and also at NASA Goddard,” said Jordan Evans, the Europa Clipper project manager at JPL. “We’ve taken Europa Clipper into a vacuum chamber to simulate the cold vacuum of space to ensure the spacecraft can maintain temperatures and function over the hot and cold portions of the mission. We did vibration and acoustic testing to shake the spacecraft like it will experience on the Falcon Heavy rocket and blasted it with the rocket noise that it’ll experience inside the Falcon Heavy fairing. We tested the hardware and software together, and system test tricking Europa Clipper into think that it’s flying from launch all the way through flybys or Europa.”
The team even simulated problems like pulling out wires to see if the spacecraft’s fault detection systems worked, and tested the electronics on board by simulating the electromagnetic environment of Jupiter.
The aim is to launch Europa Clipper from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a window that opens on October 10. Now, final work is underway, including optimizing the spacecraft’s trajectory, performing final processing of the spaceflight hardware, and final refurbishing of the boosters.