Tag: Europa Clipper

New data suggests Europa’s surface is constantly changing

9:26 am

Webb data showing variations on Europa's surface
Click for original graphic.

The uncertainty of science: Using data collected by the Webb Space Telescope combined with modeling and lab experiments, scientists now think they have found evidence that Europa’s surface is constantly changing, with materials from its interior being brought to the surface.

This new study found crystalline ice on the surface as well as at depth in some areas on Europa, especially an area known as Tara Regio. “We think that the surface is fairly porous and warm enough in some areas to allow the ice to recrystallize rapidly,” said Dr. Richard Cartwright, lead author of the paper and a spectroscopist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “Also, in this same region, generally referred to as a chaos region, we see a lot of other unusual things, including the best evidence for sodium chloride, like table salt, probably originating from its interior ocean. We also see some of the strongest evidence for CO2 and hydrogen peroxide on Europa.”

…“Our data showed strong indications that what we are seeing must be sourced from the interior, perhaps from a subsurface ocean nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) beneath Europa’s thick icy shell,” said [Dr. Ujjwal Raut of the Southwest Research Institute and co-author of the paper]. “This region of fractured surface materials could point to geologic processes pushing subsurface materials up from below. When we see evidence of CO2 at the surface, we think it must have come from an ocean below the surface.”

The graphic to the right shows the detected variations across the surface of Europa, based on the Webb spectroscopic data. It also illustrates nicely the coarseness of this data, its lack of resolution, and the uncertainties involved. The scientists have found evidence that suggests the surface is changing, but the key word here is “suggests”. They have not yet directly seen any actual changes, such as changes between two images taken at different times.

Nonetheless, the data does point in the right direction. Moreover, it would be far more unlikely if nothing on Europa changed. The fundamental question that remains unanswered is how fast things change there. And we won’t have any chance to answer this question until Europa Clipper enters Jupiter orbit in 2030 and begins multiply fly-bys of Europa.

Leave a comment

NASA releases thermal image of Mars taken by Europa Clipper

9:11 am

Mars as seen by Europa Clipper in thermal
Click for original image.

NASA yesterday released a thermal image of Mars taken by during Europa Clipper’s March 1, 2025 fly-by of the red planet on its way to Jupiter. From the caption:

This picture of Mars is a composite of several images captured by Europa Clipper’s thermal imager on March 1. Bright regions are relatively warm, with temperatures of about 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). Darker areas are colder. The darkest region at the top is the northern polar cap and is about minus 190 F (minus 125 C).

The press release doesn’t identify the bullseye feature on the left. I think the bright area inside the bullseye might be the shield volcano Syrtis Major, with the dark area to the right Isidis Basin, which means this is also a snapshot of Perseverance, sitting on the basin’s western perimeter. The dark feature on the right edge of the image might be the giant volcano Elysium Mons. These however are total guesses and likely wrong.

The mission team used this fly-by to test the spacecraft’s science instruments, and have so far found all to be working as expected.

Europa Clipper will do one more fly-by of Earth in December 2026, allowing it to reach Jupiter in April 2030.

Leave a comment

Europa Clipper completes Mars fly-by

9:21 am

Data from Europa Clipper has now confirmed that its March 1, 2025 Mars fly-by was successful, putting it on the right trajectory to do a fly-by of Earth in December 2026.

When Europa Clipper launched, navigators deliberately aimed a little away from Mars to avoid any possibility of a launch error turning into a Mars impact. Since then, they’ve performed three deep-space trajectory correction maneuvers to line up for the encounter. Europa Clipper whizzed by Mars at 17:57 UT, only 2 km away from the target height of 884 km. A final maneuver, planned for March 17th, will correct any residual trajectory error.

Only two instruments were activated, mostly as tests to see if they were operating properly. Though the data has not yet been downloaded back to Earth, engineers say that it appears all worked as expected.

If the Earth fly-by in 2026 is successful, Europa Clipper will rendezvous with Jupiter in April 2030, entering an orbit that will fly past Europa numerous times.

Leave a comment

The Europa Clipper team prepares for Mars fly-by

8:52 am

Europa Clipper's route to Jupiter
Click for original image.

As planned, Europa Clipper is set to do a very close fly-by of Mars on March 1, 2025, zipping past the red planet at a speed of 15.2 miles per second only 550 miles above its surface. The graphic to the right shows the spacecraft’s planned route to Jupiter, including an additional fly-by of Earth in 2026.

During this first fly-by the science team will test two of Europa Clipper’s instruments.

About a day prior to the closest approach, the mission will calibrate the thermal imager, resulting in a multicolored image of Mars in the months following as the data is returned and scientists process the data. And near closest approach, they’ll have the radar instrument perform a test of its operations — the first time all its components will be tested together. The radar antennas are so massive, and the wavelengths they produce so long that it wasn’t possible for engineers to test them on Earth before launch.

The spacecraft launched with transistors not properly hardened for the hostile environment around Jupiter. Engineers claimed these would “heal” themselves once in Jupiter orbit. No word on whether there has been any issue from these components since launch.

Leave a comment

JPL unveils website for viewing all high resolution imagery so far taken of Europa

9:29 am

In anticipation of the eventual arrival of Europa Clipper in orbit around Jupiter to begin its close investigation of that planet’s moon Europa, JPL yesterday unveiled a website that allows a view to quickly find and review all the high resolution imagery so far taken of Europa by the Jupiter orbiters, Voyager, Galileo, and Juno.

You can visit the Europa Trek portal website here.

The announcement touts the webpage’s ability to take viewers on “fly-overs” of the terrain, but that’s just a bell and whistle claim of little importance. More significant is the easy access this webpage provides to all that imagery, organized in context with a global map of the planet. Not only can anyone quick find interesting features, you can do so within the global context of the whole planet. In addition, the page provides detailed commentary about each image.

When Europa Clipper arrives this portal will be invaluable in deciphering the significance of every new image and datapoint.

Leave a comment

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launches NASA’s Europa Clipper mission

9:50 am

Europa's approximate orbit around Jupiter
Click for original image.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket this morning successfully launched NASA’s Europa Clipper mission on its way to Jupiter, the rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

In order to get the energy to reach Jupiter, none of the Falcon Heavy’s first stage boosters were recovered today. The two side boosters completed their sixth and final flights with this mission, while the core booster completed its first launch. The only parts of the rocket that will be recovered and reused were the two fairing halves.

To get to Jupiter, the spacecraft will make first a fly-by of Mars in February 2025, and then a fly-by of Earth in December 2026. It will arrive in Jupiter orbit in April 2030, where its orbit will be adjusted to fly close past Europa many times in order to study it closely, as shown by the graphic on the right. It will not going into orbit around the planet because that would place it permanently inside the high radiation environment around Jupiter. This is especially important because the spacecraft has installed transistors that were not properly hardened for that environment.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

98 SpaceX
45 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 115 to 68, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 98 to 85.

9 comments

SpaceX finds a way to extend the launch window for Europa Clipper

10:03 am

The launch window for SpaceX’s launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper to Jupiter has now been extended a full week because the company has revised the launch process and made hardware changes.

The new launch window runs from October 10th to November 6th.

Usually the two side boosters come back to land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station so they can be reused and sometimes the core booster is recovered at sea, but not this time. All their fuel will be used to get Europa Clipper on its way to Jupiter. Piloto said SpaceX “made some hardware modifications that enable the launch vehicle to utilize all the fuel in the boosters,” but couldn’t go into detail about what they are because the information is proprietary.

[The NASA official] added that SpaceX has gained experience in flying this configuration — it’s the 11th Falcon Heavy launch — and the company has “come up with a strategy to optimize throttling of the launch vehicle to get more performance out of it.”

NASA and SpaceX have also decided to use NASA’s orbiting communications constellation during the launch instead of ground stations, which increases their flexibility and margins.

I wonder if the FAA has approved these changes. Or even if anyone there even understands them.

13 comments

In approving Europa Clipper’s launch, NASA and JPL claim its non-spec transistors will “heal” themselves in Jupiter orbit

9:12 am

Europa in true color
Europa in true color, taken by Juno September 2022.
Click for full image.

In making the decision to allow Europa Clipper to be launched on a Falcon Heavy on October 10, 2024, NASA and JPL officials explained that after several months of testing, they believe the improperly hardened transistors installed throughout the orbiter will “heal” themselves while in the low radiation portions of its orbit around Jupiter.

[The testing] showed the transistors in question will, in effect, heal themselves during the 20 days between the high radiation doses the probe will receive during each of 49 close flybys of Europa, all of them deep in Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field and radiation environment.

In addition, onboard heaters can be used as needed to raise the temperature of affected transistors, improving the recovery process. “After extensive testing and analysis of the transistors, the Europa Clipper project and I personally have high confidence we can complete the original mission for exploring Europa as planned,” said Jordan Evans, Europa Clipper project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I hope this analysis is right, though I fear there is a lot of wishful-thinking involved. It could be however that this testing, in combination with what engineers have learned during Juno’s so-far 64 orbits around Jupiter, might have reassured them.

We however will not know for sure until Europa Clipper is on its way and reaches Jupiter in 2030.

6 comments

NASA confirms Europa Clipper launch on October 10, 2024 with questionable transistors

9:21 am

NASA yesterday confirmed that it has decided to go ahead with the October 10, 2024 launch of its $5+ billion Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter, despite the installation of transistors on the spacecraft that the agency knows are not properly hardened for that harsh environment.

Those transistors were built by a German company as part of equipment used by the spacecraft’s electrical system. Apparently that company hired a subcontractor to furnish the transistors, which failed to make them to the right specifications. Subsequent testing found that it is quite likely that at least some of the transistors will fail when Europa Clipper reaches Jupiter orbit.

It appears that NASA decided that the issue risk was small enough for the mission to achieve its minimal expected results, and decided the cost of delay and bad publicity replacing the transistors before launch would be worse than the limited science payoff and bad publicity that would take place years hence, when those transistors fail.

Remember this story in in 2030 when Europa Clipper enters Jupiter orbit and begins to experience problems.

3 comments

NASA leans toward launching Europa Clipper as scheduled, despite transistor issue

9:26 am

Though the final decision will be made in early September, NASA revealed today in a short post that management is leaning towards launching the multi-billion Europa Clipper mission as scheduled on October 10, 2024, despite a very recently discovered transistor issue where the transistors were not properly hardened in construction for the harsh radiation environment surrounding Jupiter.

The next major milestone for Clipper is Key Decision Point E on Monday, Sept. 9, in which the agency will decide whether the project is ready to proceed to launch and mission operations. NASA will provide more information at a mission overview and media briefing targeted for that same week.

The Europa Clipper mission team recently conducted extensive testing and analysis of transistors that help control the flow of electricity on the spacecraft. Analysis of the results suggests the transistors can support the baseline mission. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence suggests NASA officials have weighed the option between launching on time with a limited ability to do science once at Jupiter versus delaying the launch years to fix the transistors, and are now favoring the former option. The cost of delay would be high and long, and NASA officials might believe the bad press for that option would be much greater than a mission that only achieves its bare minimum results. For example, to admit publicly that NASA installed transistors that were not space-hardened when that necessity has been known about since the 1960s would be as embarrassing to the agency as it was for Boeing when it discovered it had installed flammable tape in its Starliner capsule. NASA management might be leaning to letting a flawed multi-billion dollar project launch, knowing its capabilities are quite limited, in order to avoid that embarrassment.

5 comments

Europa Clipper mission threatened by faulty transistors

9:31 am

Engineers have learned that transistors installed on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission were not built to the right specifications and could fail in the harsh environment surrounding Jupiter.

The issue with the transistors came to light in May when the mission team was advised that similar parts were failing at lower radiation doses than expected. In June 2024, an industry alert was sent out to notify users of this issue. The manufacturer is working with the mission team to support ongoing radiation test and analysis efforts in order to better understand the risk of using these parts on the Europa Clipper spacecraft.

Testing data obtained so far indicates some transistors are likely to fail in the high-radiation environment near Jupiter and its moon Europa because the parts are not as radiation resistant as expected. The team is working to determine how many transistors may be susceptible and how they will perform in-flight. NASA is evaluating options for maximizing the transistors’ longevity in the Jupiter system. A preliminary analysis is expected to be complete in late July.

This issue could be disaster for the mission, which has a launch window that opens on October 10, 2024. If it is impossible to replace the bad transistors, NASA will be faced with two choices, neither great. It could launch regardless and hope for the best. It could delay the mission to fix the problem, which might involve a delay of years waiting for a new launch window.

This story appears to illustrate once again the decline in quality control that appears to be happening across much of American industry. The technology for building radiation-hardened equipment has been standard for decades. For a company to deliver equipment below standard now suggests incompetence or fraud, neither of which speaks well for it and the entire industry.

12 comments

NASA: Europa Clipper’s cost rise; Mars sample return delayed

10:10 am

At a meeting this week NASA officials admitted that the cost of its Europa Clipper mission has risen by three quarters of a billion dollars, and that the sample return mission to bring back Perseverance’s core samples will be delayed, as well as now require two landers, not one.

NASA revealed significant changes to two of its flagship planetary science missions at today’s Space Science Week meeting at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The cost for Europa Clipper, which will gather data as it makes multiple swingbys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, has grown from $4.25 billion to $5 billion. Separately, NASA and ESA are replanning the Mars Sample Return mission. Two landers are needed instead of one to retrieve samples from the surface of Mars and boost them into orbit for their trip back to Earth. The launches will be in 2028 instead of 2026.

The sample return mission itself is also growing in complexity:

A Sample Fetch Rover will be sent to collect them and take them to a Mars Ascent Vehicle — a rocket — that will shoot them into Martian orbit where they will be transferred to an Earth Return Orbiter for the trip back to Earth.

Initially the plan was for the fetch rover and ascent vehicle to be launched together in 2026, and the Earth Return Orbiter in 2027. But Zurbuchen decided to convene an Independent Review Board in 2020 to get an impartial assessment of the plan by outside experts. The Board cautioned that 2026 was “not achieveable” with 2028 a more realistic date, and that the “program’s schedule and cost are not aligned with its scope.”

Consequently, NASA now has replanned the mission with two landers — one each for the fetch rover and ascent vehicle — instead of one. Both landers will launch in 2028. The Earth Return Orbiter will still launch in 2027. The samples will get back to Earth in 2033.

Prediction: The launch of this fleet of sample return spacecraft will be further delayed, and its overall cost will rise, by a lot. In fact, it is very possible that SpaceX’s Starship will have already returned samples from Mars before NASA’s mission gets off the ground.

One comment

Hubble data detects persistent water vapor on one of Europa’s hemispheres

1:30 pm

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope spanning sixteen Earth years, scientists have detected the presence of water vapor on Europa, but strangely spread only across one of the moon’s hemispheres.

Previous observations of water vapor on Europa have been associated with plumes erupting through the ice, as photographed by Hubble in 2013. They are analogous to geysers on Earth, but extend more than 60 miles high. They produce transient blobs of water vapor in the moon’s atmosphere, which is only one-billionth the surface pressure of Earth’s atmosphere.

The new results, however, show similar amounts of water vapor spread over a larger area of Europa in Hubble observations spanning from 1999 to 2015. This suggests a long-term presence of a water vapor atmosphere only in Europa’s trailing hemisphere – that portion of the moon that is always opposite its direction of motion along its orbit. The cause of this asymmetry between the leading and trailing hemisphere is not fully understood.

First, it must be emphasized that the amounts of atmospheric water being discussed are tiny, so tiny that on Earth we might consider this a vacuum.

Second, that the water vapor is only seen on the trailing hemisphere suggests there is some sort of orbital influence involved, though what that influence is remains unknown.

Hopefully when Europa Clipper finally arrives in orbit around Jupiter in 2030, with a path that will fly past Europa fifty times, we will some clarity on these questions.

2 comments

SpaceX wins contract to launch Europa Clipper to Jupiter

5:41 pm

Capitalism in space: NASA today awarded SpaceX a $178 million contract to use its Falcon Heavy rocket to launch Europa Clipper to Jupiter.

If all goes according to plan, Clipper will lift off in October 2024 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and arrive in orbit around Jupiter in April 2030. The probe will then study Europa in depth during nearly 50 close flybys of the moon over the course of about four Earth years, mission team members have said.

The award is not really a surprise. Falcon Heavy is really the only operational rocket with the power capable of launching this mission. Because for years Congress had mandated Europa Clipper be launched on SLS, it was designed with more mass than normal for such planetary missions. Delays in the SLS program however finally forced Congress to relax that mandate, but that left NASA with a payload too heavy for all operational rockets except Falcon Heavy, and even that requires this six year flight, with flybys of the Earth and Mars to get it to Jupiter.

The price for the launch is significantly greater than SpaceX normally charges for its Falcon Heavy, but since it was the only game in town, I suspect SpaceX drove a hard bargain.

10 comments

Europa Clipper to fly on commercial rocket, not SLS

11:30 pm

NASA managers have now decided unequivocally to not use SLS to launch Europa Clipper, and will instead choose a commercial rocket in about a year.

During a Feb. 10 presentation at a meeting of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG), leaders of the Europa Clipper project said the agency recently decided to consider only commercial launch vehicles for the mission, and no longer support a launch of the spacecraft on the SLS.

“We now have clarity on the launch vehicle path and launch date,” Robert Pappalardo, project scientist for Europa Clipper at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. That clarity came in the form of a Jan. 25 memo from NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office to “immediately cease efforts to maintain SLS compatibility” and move forward with a commercial launch vehicle, or CLV, he said.

Though this decision was expected following the approval of the most recent congressional budget for NASA, which contained language allowing NASA to abandon SLS if it thought it wise, this decision continues the string of recent stories that all point toward the eventually abandonment of SLS itself.

At the moment the rocket most likely to win the contract is the Falcon Heavy.

4 comments

Congress frees Europa Clipper from SLS

9:10 am

It appears that Congress has at last removed its requirement that the unmanned probe Europa Clipper must be launched on the continually delayed and very expensive SLS rocket.

Almost unnoticed, tucked into the 2021 fiscal NASA funding section of the recently passed omnibus spending bill, is a provision that would seem to liberate the upcoming Europa Clipper mission from the Space Launch System (SLS).

According to Space News, the mandate that the Europa Clipper mission be launched on an SLS remains in place only if the behind-schedule and overpriced heavy lift rocket is available and if concerns about hardware compatibility between the probe and the launcher are resolved. Otherwise, NASA is free to search for commercial alternatives to get the Europa Clipper to Jupiter’s ice-shrouded moon.

Not only will this secure Europa Clipper’s launch schedule, which had deadlines imposed by orbital mechanics that SLS was not going to meet, the more than $1 billion in savings by using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy will allow the probe to do more while giving NASA more money for other planetary missions.

This is excellent news. It signals that Congress’s long love affair with SLS because of the ample pork it sends to many districts might finally be waning. If so, there is a good chance it will finally be killed, freeing up its bloated budget.

Sadly, in a sane world some of those savings would be used to reduce the overall federal deficit even as some was also used to expand NASA’s space effort. We are not in a sane world, however, so expect no reduction in the federal budget, at all.

Still, this is a move by Congress towards some fiscal responsibility that will make NASA’s efforts more efficient. For that small improvement we should be grateful.

3 comments

Trump administration asks Senate to remove SLS requirement for Europa Clipper

8:55 am

The Trump administration has requested the Senate to change the language in its NASA spending bill to remove its requirement that Europa Clipper be launched on SLS.

NASA wants the option to launch the Europa probe using commercial rockets, such as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. It also says that there are technical reasons that make using SLS problematic, and worse, the agency simply does not have enough SLS rockets to fly its planned (but unfunded) manned Artemis missions and also launch Europa Clipper.

The House has already removed that requirement in its version of the bill. The Senate has not, probably because the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), is a big fan of SLS (much of it built in his state), and has acted for years to pump money into that project.

If the requirement is not removed, Europa Clipper’s launch will likely be delayed by several years, and cost $1.5 billion more.

2 comments

Europa Clipper to be delayed because of SLS bottleneck

10:06 am

Because Boeing will be unable to provide an SLS rocket in time for the planned 2024 launch of Europa Clipper, once the probe is completed NASA will be forced to put it in storage.

The problem is that Congress has mandated that the Jupiter probe be launched on SLS, but has only funded the first two Artemis launches to the Moon. Boeing will also need at least three years to build it, meaning that even if the money from Congress appeared today, it would likely not be ready for its ’24 launch date.

In terms of rocket science, right now, Europa Clipper can launch on a commercial vehicle, like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy or United Launch Alliance’s Delta-IV Heavy rocket, although the mission would then need a longer cruise time to reach its destination.

But in terms of the law, NASA’s hands are tied.

“Because of that, we’re planning to build the Europa Clipper and then put it into storage, because we’re not going to have an SLS rocket available until 2025,” Bridenstine said. “That’s the current plan. I don’t think that’s the right plan, but we’re going to follow the law.”

Though the common sense thing for Congress to do would be to release NASA from this mandate and allow the agency to pick the launch rocket, do not expect that to happen. Congress wants SLS because of all the pork it produces. They will not allow NASA to reduce its reliance on SLS one iota, if they can. Unless pressured publicly (which I think is NASA’s goal with this announcement), Congress will let Europa Clipper sit in a warehouse for years, at a cost of between $36 to $60 million per year, waiting for SLS.

2 comments

Another SLS screw-up related to Europa Clipper

3:16 pm

Despite being required for years by a legal congressional mandate to use SLS to launch Europa Clipper to the moon of Jupiter, NASA engineers have suddenly discovered unspecified “compatibility issues” that might make use of the rocket problematic.

At an Aug. 17 meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said the Europa Clipper mission had recently discovered compatibility issues involving the Space Launch System, the vehicle preferred by Congress to launch the spacecraft. “There have been some issues that have been uncovered just recently,” she said of the use of SLS for Europa Clipper. “We are in a lot of conversations right now with human exploration and others within the agency about what kind of steps we can take going forward.”

She did not elaborate on the compatibility issues regarding SLS. Such issues, industry sources say, likely involve the environment the spacecraft would experience during launch, such as vibrations. That environment would be very different for Europa Clipper, a relatively small spacecraft encapsulated within a payload fairing, than for the Orion spacecraft that will be the payload for most SLS launches.

“We are currently working to identify and resolve potential hardware compatibility issues and will have more information once a full analysis has been conducted,” NASA spokesperson Alana Johnson said in an Aug. 18 statement to SpaceNews. “Preliminary analysis suggests that launching Clipper may require special hardware adjustments, depending on the launch vehicle.”

This is a joke. It is also absurd and disgusting. Finally, it is also par for the course for NASA and all of today’s government, at all levels. They can’t do anything competently. From the beginning Europa Clipper was mandated to fly on SLS. And yet, they didn’t design the two to be compatible?

Based on this example we should of course demand that the government and these bureaucrats be given more power and more control over our lives. Of course.

13 comments

Problems at Europa Clipper

9:44 am

NASA has fired the project scientist for one overbudget and behind schedule instrument on Europa Clipper, and restructured work on a second instrument for similar reasons.

“We’ve been struggling on cost growth on Clipper for some time,” said Curt Niebur, program scientist for the mission at NASA Headquarters. “Overall, we’ve been largely successful in dealing with it, but late last fall, it became clear that there were three instruments that experiencing some continued and worrisome cost growth.”

The outcome of the reviews, he said, could have ranged from making no changes to the instruments to, in a worst-case scenario, terminating the instruments. The leadership of NASA’s Science Mission Directive recently decided to keep all three instruments, at least for now.

The fired scientist had been in charge of the mass spectrometer. At the moment they have installed a temporary replacement, and have put the instrument team on notice that it now has a very low priority. Should it fall further behind in schedule or budget it could easily be terminated.

The spacecraft’s imaging system also has schedule and budgeting problems, so much so that NASA was considering dropping the wide field camera, leaving Europa Clipper with only a narrow field camera. Right now both have been retained, but the wide field camera might still be dropped if costs continue to rise.

7 comments

Europa Clipper faces budget overruns

10:25 am

NASA’s $4.25 billion dollar mission to orbit the Jupiter moon Europa now faces cost overruns that threaten its launch in 2023.

The management of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, facing dwindling cost reserves while still years away from launch, is looking at cost saving options that would preserve the mission’s science.

In a Feb. 3 presentation at a meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group in Houston, Jan Chodas, project manager for Europa Clipper at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said she was looking for ways to restore cost reserves that had declined precipitously in the last year.

Chodas said that Europa Clipper had met a JPL recommendation of 25% cost reserves, known at the lab as unallocated future expenses (UFE), when it completed a final “delta” preliminary design review in June 2019. By November, though, those reserves had fallen to just 12%, a level deemed “unacceptably low” for a mission not scheduled for launch until at least 2023.

To save money, they are “streamlining hardware testing and scaling back work on flight spare hardware. The project has also reduced the frequency of meetings of the mission’s science team.”

When the reserves in a government budget get this low, it almost always guarantees that the budget will go over. When the reserves get this low this early in the project, it almost always guarantees that the budget will go over, by a lot.

There have been other indications that Europa Clipper’s budget is in trouble. In March NASA canceled one science instrument to save money.

Making matter worse has been our lovely Congress, which has required this mission fly on its bloated, over-budget, and behind schedule SLS rocket, a mandate that is also costing the project an additional $1.5 billion (for the launch) while threatening its launch date (because of SLS delays). NASA would rather have the option to launch Clipper on the more reliable commercial and already operational Falcon Heavy, for about $100 million, thereby saving more than a billion dollars while guaranteeing its launch date. Congress so far has refused to budge, and has in fact insisted that the mission be delayed several years if necessary for getting it on SLS.

Meanwhile, Clipper itself is doing what too many big NASA projects routinely do, go overbudget.

Our federal government. Doesn’t its management skills just warm your heart?

8 comments

White House: Cost for each SLS launch is $2 billion

9:34 am

According to the Office of Management and Budget (OPM), the cost for each SLS launch is now estimated to equal $2 billion.

This is the first time anyone in the executive branch has put a number to the SLS per launch cost. NASA has always refused to give a number, for good reason, since this price compares so horribly with even the most expensive private rocket (generally more than $200 million for the biggest members of the Delta rocket family). The Falcon Heavy costs about $100 million, so that to get the same mass into orbit would require two launches, but that would still be only $200 million, one tenth the cost.

The article then notes how this cost is affecting the Europa Clipper mission, which has three launch options, with SLS mandated by Congress.

The powerful SLS booster offers the quickest ride for the six-ton spacecraft to Jupiter, less than three years. But for mission planners, there are multiple concerns about this rocket beyond just its extraordinary cost. There is the looming threat that the program may eventually be canceled (due to its cost and the emergence of significantly lower cost, privately built rockets). NASA’s human exploration program also has priority on using the SLS rocket, so if there are manufacturing issues, a science mission might be pushed aside. Finally, there is the possibility of further developmental delays—significant ground testing of SLS has yet to begin.

Another option is United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy rocket, which has an excellent safety record and has launched several high-profile missions for NASA. However, this rocket requires multiple gravity assists to push the Clipper into a Jupiter orbit, including a Venus flyby. This heating would add additional thermal constraints to the mission, and scientists would prefer to avoid this if at all possible.

A final possibility is SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, with a kick stage. This booster would take a little more than twice as long as the SLS rocket to get the Clipper payload to Jupiter, but it does not require a Venus flyby and therefore avoids those thermal issues. With a track record of three successful flights, the Falcon Heavy also avoids some of the development and manufacturing concerns raised by SLS vehicle. Finally, it offers the lowest cost of the three options.

The fact that Congress is requiring the use of SLS for a cost of $2 billion, a rocket that might not even be ready in time, when Europa Clipper could be launched on two other already operational rockets at about a tenth of the cost illustrates well the overall corruption and incompetence that permeates Congress. They really aren’t interested in the interests of the nation. They’d rather distribute money to big contractors and local interests, even if it costs the taxpayer billions and risks the mission’s success.

9 comments

NASA Inspector General to Congress: Free Europa Clipper from SLS

8:44 am

In a letter to Congress on August 27, 2019, NASA’s inspector general has called for Congress to immediately abandon the legal requirement it imposed on Europa Clipper to fly on NASA’s SLS rocket, thereby allowing NASA to choose any commercial rocket to launch the spacecraft.

The letter [pdf] is amazingly blunt.

[W]e write to highlight an issue at NASA that we believe requires immediate action by Congress. Language in NASA’s appropriation legislation requires the Agency to launch a satellite to Europa, a moon of Jupiter, in 2023 on the yet-to-be-completed Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. However, because of developmental delays and, more significantly, NASA’s plans to use the first three SLS rockets produced for its Artemis lunar program, an SLS will not be available until 2025 at the earliest. Consequently, if completed on its projected schedule, the approximately $3 billion dollar Europa spacecraft (known as “Europa Clipper”) will need to be stored for at least 2 years at a cost of $3 to $5 million per month until an SLS becomes available. NASA recently added $250 million in Headquarters-held reserves to the project to address these storage and related personnel costs.

Congress could reduce risks to both the Europa mission and Artemis program while potentially saving taxpayers up to $1 billion by providing NASA the flexibility in forthcoming fiscal year (FY) 2020 appropriations legislation to determine the most cost effective and timely vehicle to launch the Europa Clipper mission in 2023 or whenever the satellite is completed.

As blunt as the letter is, the wording above is also very careful to hide the fact that the $1 billion savings will come, not from avoiding the launch delay, but from buying a private commercial launch vehicle (estimated launch cost about $100 million) versus using SLS (estimated launch cost of $1 billion to $4 billion).

Will Congress take this advice? It should, though I am pessimistic. Our Congress has not shown much interest in doing the smart thing when it comes to SLS for about a decade. Why should things change now?

One comment

NASA IG finds both Europa missions a mess

10:25 am

Our incompetent federal government: A report released today [pdf] by NASA’s inspector general has found that the management of the Europa Clipper orbiter and the later Europa lander missions, both mandated by Congress, are facing serious budget and schedule risks, despite being given more than three-quarters of a billion dollars more than requested.

Congress has taken a strong interest in the project and since fiscal year (FY) 2013 has appropriated about $2.04 billion to NASA for a Europa mission—$1.26 billion more than the Agency requested.

…Despite [this] robust early-stage funding, a series of significant developmental and personnel resource challenges place the Clipper’s current mission cost estimates and planned 2023 target launch at risk. In addition, although Congress directed NASA to use the SLS to launch the Clipper, it is unlikely to be available by the congressionally mandated 2023 date and therefore the Agency continues to maintain spacecraft capabilities to accommodate both the SLS and two commercial launch vehicles, the Delta IV Heavy and Falcon Heavy. [emphasis mine]

The lander meanwhile is in even worse shape, especially because its congressionally-mandated launch date on SLS in 2025 seems impossible.

It seems to me that this entire project could be the poster boy for the overall incompetence of our so-called “betters” in Washington, who in the past three decades have failed spectacularly in practically every major project they have undertaken. The project was mandated on NASA by Congress, led by former congressman John Culberson (R-Texas), who was then the chairman of the House subcommittee that was in charge of funding the agency. It was his pet project. Though the planetary science community were glad to have this mission, it was listed as their second priority in their 2011 decadal survey. Culberson made it first, and also made sure it got a lot of money, far more than NASA ever requested.

Despite this strong support, the inspector general has now found that the project is being badly mismanaged and faces budget overruns and scheduling problems. The scheduling problems partly result from the project’s bad management, but mostly because of Congress’s demand that the spacecraft fly on SLS. Our vaunted elected officials wanted to give that boondoggle (they own pet project) a mission, something it didn’t have, and Europa Clipper and Lander were therefore given that task.

The problem, as I have documented endlessly, is that SLS is woefully behind schedule. It appears it will likely not be ready for Europa Clipper’s launch window in 2023.

But hey, let’s give our federal government more responsibility and power! Let’s go socialist!

Leave a comment

NASA cancels overbudget instrument for Europa clipper

8:36 am

Because its budget had ballooned to three times its original estimate, NASA has decided to cancel a science instrument for its Europa Clipper probe to Jupiter’s moon.

[Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science] said in the memo that, at the time of the February review, ICEMAG’s estimated cost has grown to $45.6 million, $16 million above its original cost trigger and $8.3 million above a revised cost trigger established just a month earlier. That cost was also three times above the original estimate in the ICEMAG proposal. “The level of cost growth on ICEMAG is not acceptable, and NASA considers the investigation to possess significant potential for additional cost growth,” Zurbuchen wrote in the memo. “As a result, I decided to terminate the ICEMAG investigation.”

The contrast between how NASA operates in its unmanned planetary science programs with how the agency operates in its manned programs is striking. The agency’s planetary program is probably its most successful achievement, and has been for decades. Spacecraft almost always get built close to budget, launch on time, and accomplish amazing things when their arrive at their planetary targets, either the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, or Pluto and beyond. Part of the reason for this success is a willingness by NASA to make hard decisions, such as the one above, even if it might ruffle some political feathers. The result is that everyone focuses on getting the job done, on budget and on time. They know that if they screw up, as the ICEMAG team did here, they might find themselves on the chopping block.

In contrast, as I noted in my previous post, NASA allows things to get out of control in its manned program. In fact, they might consider this a feature of the system, not a bug. The goal is not to accomplish anything, but to funnel cash to the states and districts of elected officials. The result is that nothing ever flies, or if it does, it does so very late, very over budget, and often with technical difficulties. Worse, the focus on pleasing corrupt lawmakers like Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) means that NASA is often hostile to the success in manned space by others, such as SpaceX.

2 comments

Giant ice pinnacles on Europa

9:15 am

In a new paper scientists note that getting the congressionally mandated Europa Clipper safely to the surface of Jupiter’s moon might be threatened by the existence there of forests of giant five-story high ice pinnacles.

Probes have shown that Europa’s ice-bound surface is riven with fractures and ridges, and new work published today in Nature Geosciences suggests any robotic lander could face a nasty surprise, in the form of vast fields of ice spikes, each standing as tall as a semitruck is long.

Such spikes are created on Earth in the frigid tropical peaks of the Andes Mountains, where they are called “pentinentes,” for their resemblance to devout white-clad monks. First described by Charles Darwin, pentinentes are sculpted by the sun in frozen regions that experience no melt; instead, the fixed patterns of light cause the ice to directly vaporize, amplifying minute surface variations that result in small hills and shadowed hollows. These dark hollows absorb more sunlight than the bright peaks around them, vaporizing down further in a feedback loop.

This work is based on computer models, so it has a lot of uncertainty. It also appears to assume that these pentinentes will be widespread across Europa’s equatorial regions, something so unlikely I find it embarrassing that they even imply it. I guarantee Europa’s surface will be more varied than that. If they are designing Europa Clipper properly, it will go into orbit first to scout out the best landing site, and will be able to avoid such hazards.

Leave a comment

Radiation maps of Europa

10:08 am

By culling together data from Voyager 1 and the Galileo orbiter, scientists have created a radiation map of the surface of Europa.

Using data from Galileo’s flybys of Europa two decades ago and electron measurements from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, Nordheim and his team looked closely at the electrons blasting the moon’s surface. They found that the radiation doses vary by location. The harshest radiation is concentrated in zones around the equator, and the radiation lessens closer to the poles.

Mapped out, the harsh radiation zones appear as oval-shaped regions, connected at the narrow ends, that cover more than half of the moon.

…In his new paper, Nordheim didn’t stop with a two-dimensional map. He went deeper, gauging how far below the surface the radiation penetrates, and building 3D models of the most intense radiation on Europa. The results tell us how deep scientists need to dig or drill, during a potential future Europa lander mission, to find any biosignatures that might be preserved.

The answer varies, from 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) in the highest-radiation zones – down to less than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) deep in regions of Europa at middle- and high-latitudes, toward the moon’s poles.

This model, which by the way probably has large margins of error, will be used as a guide by the Europa Clipper scientists now planning that orbiter’s mission.

Leave a comment