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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Somewhere in the lonely silence of the solar system, the Europa Clipper is on its way to investigate a beautiful icy moon of Jupiter's called Europa. This is the largest spacecraft ever built by NASA. It looks like a bundle of technology and machinery flanked by two huge wings.
Europa is fascinating to scientists and to people like me because it has water, which forms a thick crust of ice on its surface. And having water, scientists think maybe, just maybe, just possibly, Europa might also have life swimming below all that ice.
Chapter 2: What is the Europa Clipper mission and why is Europa significant?
Tracey Drain is here today. Tracey is the chief engineer at NASA of this mission. She's an aerospace engineer who's worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab for over two decades, working to develop spacecraft that boldly go where no human has gone before. Tracey is in Australia for Brisbane's World Science Festival, and she's also a National Geographic Explorer. Hello, Tracey. Welcome.
Hello, Richard. Thanks for having me.
What does it mean to be a National Geographic Explorer?
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.
I think space missions, this is just me, but I think the space program reflects some of the very, very best human values. You're the chief engineer of this program, the Europa Space Clipper mission. Tell me about its mission objectives. What are you all hoping to achieve by sending this spacecraft out towards Europa?
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.
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Chapter 3: What are the primary objectives of the Europa Clipper spacecraft?
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.
Well, I was just thinking that as you were saying that, you know, if I put a powerful magnet near my laptop, which is right next to me, it'll just blitz, it'll wipe it out. So you've got incredibly insensitive, very incredibly sensitive devices on board there. What kind of shielding do you have to have on it to protect it from the massive fields that are being thrown off by the planet Jupiter?
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. Maybe half an inch, maybe less. Google is your friend. Go look. I'm sure it's out there. In order to take the environment for the radiation inside the vault down to a level that's more manageable.
It becomes more like the environment at Mars, which we're very used to designing for.
Now, as an engineer, you're trained in the effects of gravity on the surface of the Earth, the conditions that we often describe as normal. It sounds to me you're sending a device into a place where nature becomes extremely weird. Do you have to have like a special weird science consultant or is that you? Are you that person that is kind of aware of all that weird science?
I just wonder if that's inherent in your job or do you need to have experts around you?
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Chapter 4: How does the spacecraft's size impact its mission capabilities?
Io is like a sort of a molten chunk of rock, and that's because it's being squeezed by Jupiter's gravity like a tennis ball.
You got it. Same thing.
But the thing that makes Europa different, you're saying, is that it has water, which keeps like, I don't know, melting and refreezing and melting and refreezing around it. So it looks smooth and kind of looks fine on the outside. Mm-hmm.
So one of the reasons why it's so exciting that Jupiter has water, I know you're not a bioscientist, but this means that there just might, there's a possibility that life as we know it could exist below that. Does that even, I know that's not your field, but does that excite you, Tracey?
Right, not my field. And we like to say, just to be scientifically careful about it, is that the moon has the capability, may have the capability of supporting that. Yeah, I know. Trying to get me fired here.
No, I know. This is my words. I'm saying it just might. It could possibly be. It probably doesn't. But there's the tiny...
It could possibly support some kind of life. And the thing that I think people are looking for is there's this lovely, very hard to pronounce acronym that I've learned called CHINOPS, which is carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur.
that if those elements are there and you have water and you have some kind of energy source, which might be the tidal heating coming from below, and also the weak sunlight and radiation coming from above, the combination of those things could potentially be viable for life.
And for me, as just a normal human out there, I find that very exciting and super tantalizing that scientists are trying to go and investigate.
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Chapter 5: How does the spacecraft navigate and travel to Jupiter?
I know that our ground-penetrating, ice-penetrating radar is going to go down fairly deep. It'll tell us how thick the ice is. It'll give us a sense of the depth of the ocean. And I think perhaps the magnetometer will teach us a little bit more about the entire makeup of the inside. I think there is a rocky core. I'm not 100% sure.
So what's going to be the path of the Europa Clipper? Is it going to orbit around Europa or is that not even possible?
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.
What do we know about the weather systems on Jupiter? And is that a factor for you as well?
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.
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Chapter 6: What engineering challenges does the Europa Clipper face near Jupiter?
Lexmark Printers is there. But I... had someone come up to me and say, so what do you want to do? I'm like, well, I want to work for NASA. Ha ha. But tell me what you got. Well, it turns out they had a contact at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia and said, we can try to get you set up with a phone interview. And I'm like, that would be great. So they did that.
And I talked to someone on the phone for about half an hour. At the end of the call, she said, I think you'd be great. Can you start in May? And it took me a second, you know, covering the phone and freaking out for a second.
Yes, please.
And so that's how I got my first foot in the door at a NASA facility. And once you go do an internship at a NASA facility, at least back then, it was easier to come back. So I did a fall and then a summer and then a spring and then a summer and got to meet students from all over the country. So after that, I went to Georgia Tech. for two years to get a master's in that.
And the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was one of the many NASA centers and companies, aerospace companies that came to the career fair at Georgia Tech interviewing students. So I bumped into a recruiter and drooled all over them. All right, all right. Please hire me. I would sweep your floors. Thanks. And they let me come out to interview at the lab and I got hired right out of grad school.
So does that mean as an engineer, you're an engineer who's got to specialise in extreme gravity or lack of gravity and that kind of thing? Does that change all the parameters of engineering when you're a space engineer?
Yeah, I think it's not quite as cut and dry as that. So I studied mechanical engineering, which is how you get things to move together in order to accomplish some kind of goal.
They've got to bear weight though, don't they, these things, very often, don't they?
Yeah, how do You can think about it this way. There are lots of forces that act on any machines. Like here we are sitting on this chair. If you're in your car, you're sitting in the car. And as the wheels are turning, there's a force of friction against the wheels.
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Chapter 7: What measures are taken to protect the spacecraft from radiation?
Maybe there are other ways for a rogue planet to form, but that's the way that I know. And you're right. Since they're not near a star and going around it in a repeatable fashion for Kepler to measure that dip in brightness, Kepler cannot find rogue planets like that.
From my learned point of view, I'm pretty much sure that's where Thanos is hiding out on one of those planets. That's just my inexpert opinion, though.
Once you designed the spacecraft, you and your colleagues designed the Europa Clipper, this huge thing that's as big as a basketball court, as you said, you've then got to figure out a way to fold it up, like make it collapsible and stick it in the nose cone of that Falcon rocket you were talking about. you compacted it somehow, like a bit of camping equipment in the nose cone of this rocket.
You shoot it up with the rocket out through the gravity world of the Earth into space. What happens when it comes out? Does it sort of come out like a butterfly from a chrysalis?
Yeah, that's actually not a bad analogy. So we definitely, being able to fold up the solar arrays is an integral part of the original design. If you imagine, stick your arms out to the side, if you had about three elbows, then you could fold your arms in very nicely. That's how it happens.
And we had long conversations about when you fold it up and you have the cells that are on the outside, should those be the cells that are power producing or should you fold it so that the power producing ones are on the inside in case something happens to hit them? Do you protect them or do you need to make power? There's a whole bunch of trades that are like that.
Ours, we did power side out so that if somehow it took longer for the arrays to deploy than we thought, you had some power while you're trying to figure out what's going on. And this is one of the pieces where the spacecraft needs to be autonomously set to do all the things. We have very large batteries on the spacecraft.
Unlike some missions where you could launch and you'd only have like a couple of hours before you had to get the arrays out or you would run out of power, We had many hours. I think something like 19 hours because we're here at the Earth and cells are out. But at any rate, you have the spacecraft folded up. It's in the nose cone of the rocket.
You launch the rocket and we're all like on the ground with our hearts beating very, very fast.
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