NASA’s Europa Clipper to Get Set of Super-Large Solar Panels

The largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for planetary exploration has just received its “wings”: enormous solar panels to power it on its journey to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft was recently outfitted with a set of massive solar panels at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The solar panels, each about 46½ feet (14.2 meters) long and about 13½ feet (4.1 meters) high, are the largest NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission. They must be large so they can capture as much sunlight as possible as the spacecraft studies Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is five times farther from the sun than Earth.

The arrays are folded and secured to the spacecraft’s main body for launch, but when deployed into space, Europa Clipper will span more than 100 feet (30.5 meters) — a few feet longer than a professional basketball court. The “wings,” as engineers call them, are so large that they could only be opened one at a time in the clean room of Kennedy’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where crews are preparing the spacecraft for the launch period, which begins Oct. 10.

Meanwhile, engineers continue to evaluate radiation-hardness tests on the spacecraft’s transistors. Longevity is critical, as the spacecraft will travel for more than five years to reach the Jupiter system in 2030. As it orbits the gas giant, the probe will fly by Europa multiple times, using a suite of scientific instruments to find out whether the ocean beneath its icy mantle has conditions that could support life.

To power those flybys in a region of the solar system that receives only 3% to 4% of the sunlight that Earth does, each solar array consists of five panels. Designed and built at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and Airbus in Leiden, the Netherlands, they are far more sensitive than the type of solar panels used on houses, and the highly efficient spacecraft will make the most of the energy they generate.

On Jupiter, Europa Clipper’s arrays will collectively produce about 700 watts of electricity, about what a small microwave or coffee maker needs to operate. Batteries on the spacecraft will store the energy to run all of the electronics, a full complement of science instruments, communications equipment, the computer and a complete 24-engine propulsion system.

While they do all that, the arrays must operate in extreme cold. The hardware’s temperature drops to -400 degrees Fahrenheit (-240 degrees Celsius) when they’re in Jupiter’s shadow. To ensure the panels can operate in such extreme conditions, engineers tested them in a specialized cryogenic chamber at the Liège Space Center in Belgium.

“The spacecraft is cozy. It has heating elements and an active thermal loop, which keeps it in a much more normal temperature range,” said APL’s Taejoo Lee, the solar array product supply manager. “But the solar arrays are exposed to the vacuum of space without any heating elements. They’re completely passive, so whatever the environment is, those are the temperatures they’re going to get.”

About 90 minutes after launch, the arrays will unfold from their folded position in about 40 minutes. About two weeks later, six antennas attached to the arrays will also unfold to their full size. The antennas belong to the radar instrument, which will search for water in and under the moon’s thick ice layer, and they are enormous, unfolding to a length of 57.7 feet (17.6 meters), perpendicular to the arrays.

“At the beginning of the project, we really thought it would be nearly impossible to develop a solar array that was strong enough to support these giant antennas,” Lee said. “It was difficult, but the team brought a lot of creativity to the challenge and we figured it out.”

More about the mission

Europa Clipper’s three main scientific objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our own.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, is leading the development of the Europa Clipper mission in collaboration with APL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL designed the main body of the spacecraft in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall is providing program management for the Europa Clipper mission.

NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy, manages launch services for the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which launches aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.

More information about Europe can be found here:

europa.nasa.gov

Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-393-6215
[email protected]

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1501
[email protected] / [email protected]

2024-112