Tracy Drain

Europa is made of water.

And it actually has this really beautiful plaque.

illustration, I guess you would call it, that is inscribed what the sound waves look like of people saying water in many different languages, and including one that is representative of American Sign Language.

I have often felt like I've had the best job in the world because I grew up as a kid who really liked...

puzzles and learning new things and discoveries and as an engineer my job is to figure out how things work together figure out how to fix them when they don't so it's all about puzzles in service to discovering new things in space so yeah I really have enjoyed my job a lot over the last two and a half decades.

You know, it's interesting because maybe we're so used to communicating digitally with things these days, even communicating digitally with other humans who are on the other side of the world through our telephones.

And we communicate with Europa so often that in a way it doesn't feel like she's very far away.

We have our little names.

We call her Clippy when we're talking about Europa Clipper.

And when are we going to have our next contact with Clippy and how's she doing and what are we seeing in all the telemetry?

So in a way, it still feels intellectually very close, even though in physical distance, she's very far away.

It's been a delight.

Thanks for having me, Richard.