Tag: Europa
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Europa Clipper’s main body complete, teams continue work toward 2024 launch
In early June, the main body of NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper spacecraft completed construction and was shipped to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California soon after. The arrival of Europa Clipper’s main body marks a major milestone in the construction of the spacecraft and shows that the spacecraft and its teams are on…
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Europa Clipper’s main body complete, teams continue work toward 2024 launch
In early June, the main body of NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper spacecraft completed construction and was shipped to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California soon after. The arrival of Europa Clipper’s main body marks a major milestone in the construction of the spacecraft and shows that the spacecraft and its teams are on…
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NASA cites Falcon flight heritage to select SpaceX to launch Europa Clipper
On Friday, July 23, NASA announced that SpaceX was the winner of a commercial procurement to launch the Europa Clipper mission, which will closely study the icy Galilean moon of Jupiter in search of signs of life and/or ongoing geological activity. The mission is due to launch no earlier than October 2024. SpaceX’s heavy-lift Falcon…
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Europa volcanism & interior heating modeled in detail, offers research targets for upcoming missions
Europa, an icy Jovian moon that likely possesses an ocean beneath its icy crust, may have an interior that is hot enough to produce volcanic activity on its seafloor. New research provides evidence that this seafloor volcanism likely occurred in the moon’s past and maybe ongoing at present as well. The team of researchers, led…
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NASA decides to launch Europa Clipper on commercial rocket in 2024
Artist’s concept of the Europa Clipper spacecraft, with Europa and Jupiter in the background. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA has decided to launch the multibillion-dollar Europa Clipper mission on a commercial heavy-lift rocket in October 2024, and not on the government-owned Space Launch System, officials said Wednesday. The decision ends a prolonged dilemma for NASA, which until…
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NASA mission extension enables first flybys of Jupiter’s moons in 20 years
Artist’s concept of the Juno spacecraft at Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech In a pair of mission extensions, NASA has cleared the way for more seismic observations on Mars with the robotic InSight lander and approved plans for the Juno spacecraft to alter its orbit and perform close flybys of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, Ganymede, and the…
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Juno team planning close flybys of Jupiter’s moons
The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute NASA’s Juno spacecraft could perform the first close flybys since the early 2000s of three of Jupiter’s largest moons, including Europa, if the space…
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Jupiter looms large in spectacular Hubble image
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this view of Jupiter and its icy moon Europa on Aug. 25. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team The Hubble Space Telescope turned toward Jupiter last month, capturing colorful views of the giant planet and…
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ESA books launch of Jupiter orbiter with Arianespace
Artist’s illustration of the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, spacecraft during a flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Credit: ESA The European Space Agency has reserved an Ariane launcher to send a spacecraft toward Jupiter in May 2022, and the mission’s project manager said Tuesday officials could assign the probe to Europe’s new Ariane 6…
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NASA puts SLS Europa Clipper option in the wind tunnel
NASA engineers at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, recently completed one set of wind tunnel tests in a series on the aerodynamics of the newest Space Launch System (SLS) vehicle configuration. Data was collected during several hundred supersonic test runs in the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel at Langley of a scale model of…