Tracy Drain

But that magnetic field is gigantic.

And that traps charged particles coming from the solar wind and also from one of the moon's IO that's spewing out volcanic stuff all the time.

Those things get trapped in the magnetic field lines, accelerated at near the speed of light and go crazy.

crashing into the aurora in the north and south pole of Jupiter.

So this makes a donut of electricity, that's the technical term, or a donut of radiation around the planet.

And if you send a spacecraft there, you have to deal with that.

And the way that we have dealt with it traditionally on a mission like Juno, that I also had the privilege to work on for several years,

You orbit Jupiter, but you mostly try to stay out of the radiation zone.

So you go in.

If you're studying the planet Jupiter, you go in very quickly and take all of your measurements and then you get the heck out of there for a while.

That's how Juno does it.

For Europa Clipper, Europa, the moon, orbits Jupiter inside that radiation donut.

But instead of trying to orbit Europa all the time and just bathing in the radiation constantly, you orbit Jupiter and you go flying by Europa to take a bunch of images once every two to three weeks, which is what we'll do when we get there.

And so part of the way you deal with it is by staying out of it as much as possible.

But when you go in relatively frequently like we will, you need to put shielding around the sensitive electronics like the computers and other components for the instruments in order to –

take down the level of radiation they'll see on a regular basis.

And there's many other things.

What we use on Europa Clipper is an aluminum vault in order to protect the equipment.

And, you know, it's not super thick.

I can't remember off the top of my head.