Tracy Drain

I'm not 100% sure.

Yeah, sadly, no.

Orbiting around Europa would expose us to way more radiation than our spacecraft is designed for.

So we're going to orbit around Jupiter.

And in the beginning of the mission, every 21 days, we will fly by Europa and take a whole bunch of measurements with our suite of science instruments and then orbit.

Almost midway through the mission, we will shift down to every 14 days flying by.

So over the course of four years, we'll do about 50 science flybys.

Oh, good question.

We are actually going to be high enough above the clouds of Jupiter that it's not going to affect the spacecraft, that we really just treat it like one big massive planet in order to keep our trajectory in the form that we want it to be.

But I know a little bit about the weather on Jupiter because I spent time working on the Juno mission, which has been in the Jupiter system since 2016.

Also orbiting Jupiter in a much bigger orbit about every 53 and a half days, going by and taking a lot of measurements of the planet there.

And we know that Jupiter is just gorgeous.

When you close your eyes and think about what you've seen in school books of Jupiter, you see these lovely tiptoes.

tan and kind of orange and a little reddish cloud structures and then the huge great red spot that we all know about.

And what I learned is that the darker bands that you see are actually deeper in the clouds than the lighter bands.

And one of the reasons that the scientists know that is the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted with Jupiter in 2009.

And it was broken up as it came into the system and as the individual pieces went in.

Unfortunately,

For us, at least in the United States, when we had telescopes that were watching Jupiter, the impacts happened on the backside.

And so you had to wait until Jupiter rotated around.