Tracy Drain

Hello, Richard.

Thanks for having me.

You know, it's really cool.

I have just learned that National Geographic explorers are not only people who are out on the savanna looking at lions with giant cameras.

They can also be storytellers like me who tell people about the riches of our solar system and other things that you might not have imagined.

Yeah, right.

So Europa Clipper is a mission that had been a gleam in the eye of scientists for over two decades, people who have been really deeply curious to go and investigate this moon of Jupiter, which is a little bit smaller than our Earth's moon.

But as you mentioned, scientists have very strong evidence suggesting that there is a large amount of water underneath this ice shell, more than all of the Earth's oceans combined times two.

And so engineers like myself have worked for many years.

I personally only joined the mission in 2020, so I'm a relative newcomer to the team, to build a spacecraft that can support a suite of instruments that can study things like how thick the ice is by ground-penetrating radar and what the composition of the surface is, what kind of chemicals have landed on it, maybe from geysers that have come up through the ice or that have just been brought there by comets billions of years ago.

We're also trying to study the temperature of the ice.

There's a thermal camera that lets you see areas that are warmer than others.

Maybe the ice is a little bit thinner.

In general, scientists are trying to determine whether the moon is capable of supporting life, whether it has the right chemistry, the right amount of energy, that it's been there for long enough, that kind of thing.

Absolutely.

There's going to be a really lovely camera there that'll let you see much more close-up, in-detail images than we ever have of the moon before.

The spacecraft needs to be so large because it needs to generate enough power from its solar arrays to power all of the instruments and also to keep it warm.

There's only 4% of the light available at Jupiter as there is at the sun.

And so we have these enormous solar arrays.

If you took the spacecraft with its solar arrays unfurled and stuck it on an NBA-sized basketball court, the edges of the wings would hang off the edges of the court.