Richard Fidler

What are the big challenges in building a spacecraft that can actually exist and function anywhere near Jupiter?

Well, I was just thinking that as you were saying that, you know, if I put a powerful magnet near my laptop, which is right next to me, it'll just blitz, it'll wipe it out.

So you've got incredibly insensitive, very incredibly sensitive devices on board there.

What kind of shielding do you have to have on it to protect it from the massive fields that are being thrown off by the planet Jupiter?

Now, as an engineer, you're trained in the effects of gravity on the surface of the Earth, the conditions that we often describe as normal.

It sounds to me you're sending a device into a place where nature becomes extremely weird.

Do you have to have like a special weird science consultant or is that you?

Are you that person that is kind of aware of all that weird science?

I just wonder if that's inherent in your job or do you need to have experts around you?

If something goes wrong, if you have Apollo 13 moment on it, for example, there's no humans on board this craft, so it's not a matter of life and death.

But if you have something that goes badly wrong, is that the moment when you wake up in the middle of the night because there's a chopper on your front lawn, Tracy?

They're flying you to JPL headquarters to come and fix it.

Do these things have the ability to self-repair?

I mean, what happens when something goes wrong?

Now, Europa, can you describe what it looks like from the pictures we already have of it?

Did you say recently?

Seriously.

Time of the dinosaurs.

Right.

Because our moon is pockmarked and cratered and because it's rocky in its surface.