Tracy Drain

So there's so many excitement, stress, fear.

There were a couple of things that happened in the last minutes leading up to launch where these incredibly professional people on the launch vehicle team were saying,

that there had been like a thermal anomaly that they were working, like we're working our procedures.

And those of us that are in the control room, like staring at each other, like it's 120 seconds to launch.

What is happening down there?

Because at some point you reach a time where if you have to scrub, you have to like take all the fuel out of the launch vehicle and it takes another couple of days in order to reset and be able to launch again.

So we were like, are we really going to go today?

What's happening?

And it took them down until, I want to say,

30, 40, 45 seconds to say that it was clear before we lost.

So we were all like about to pass out, but still on point to do your thing once the vehicle gets off the ground.

So yeah, it was, it was pretty crazy times.

Clipper right now is actually on its way closer into Earth than it has been.

So we launched the spacecraft in October 2024.

It gets going in this fairly large orbit so that we could go past Mars, do a Mars flyby to steal some of Mars' momentum and get going a bit faster.

That puts us in an even bigger orbit, but on a loop such that we come back by the Earth in December 3rd of this year in order to steal a little bit of the Earth's momentum and get going even faster on our last leg all the way out to Jupiter.

We're going to arrive in April of 2030.

So, yeah, strap in, bring some snacks.

We, I think over the entire mission, because of the way we have to use the gravity of Jupiter to set up for the Europa flybys, we're going to orbit a total of something like 75 times, but there will be 50, about 50 flybys of the moon Europa.

Yeah, good question.