Spacecraft Makers: Simulating Space to Test Europa Clipper
How did the team working on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft test whether the spacecraft will work properly in outer space? They put the spacecraft in a special chamber that mimics the kind of sunlight and airless environment the spacecraft will experience when it’s in outer space.
In this video, Tony Licari - a mechanical systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California - shows how the team moved the main body of the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission into JPL's historic 85-foot-tall, 25-foot-wide (26-meter-by-8-meter) thermal vacuum chamber. Inside the chamber, the team simulated the kinds of conditions the spacecraft will experience while flying through space, and practiced deploying instruments. Europa Clipper successfully completed those tests in March 2024.
Spacecraft Makers is a video series that takes audiences behind the scenes to learn more about how space missions, like Europa Clipper, come together. Europa Clipper will explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa to see if there are conditions suitable for life. The spacecraft needs to be hardy enough to survive a 1.6 billion-mile, six-year journey to Jupiter, and sophisticated enough to perform a detailed science investigation of Europa once it arrives at the Jupiter system in 2030.
Europa Clipper is expected to launch in October 2024 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
For more information on the mission go to: https://europa.nasa.gov/.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Transcript
Raquel Villanueva
The Europa Clipper spacecraft behind me is in a chamber that recreates outer space. We're going to show you how it was put to the test before making the journey to Jupiter's icy moon.
SPACECRAFT MAKERS TITLE
Raquel Villanueva
Built in 1961, this 85ft tall, 25ft wide space simulator has tested deep space missions like Voyager and the Perseverance Mars rover. Tony's team had to get it ready for Europa Clipper.
Tony Licari
Europa Clipper spacecraft had to be transported from a different building on lab to this building. This is a very, very narrow facility and a very small space to get a very large spacecraft into the chamber.
JPL Engineer
3. 2. 1. All Stop. Stop.
Tony Licari
We've been planning this for almost a year or more to get all of the moves choreographed down to where people were going to stand to get the spacecraft from this hallway in through this chamber. It weighs 6,000 pounds when the spacecraft is lifted off of its fixture, is free hanging from the crane's.
JPL Engineer
We’re going to move the spacecraft three feet East.
Tony Licari
And the only control we have of the spacecraft is from. taglines. A tagline is just a rope like you would see in the Macy's Day Parade as they pull the floats. The tagline operators are our only way of managing the spacecraft's weight, as we progress it on the crane into the chamber. It's a very large team that works on this. It really shows how well we bonded together to be able to do something like this over just a few days.
Once the doors closed, there are pumps in the room that pull out all the air from this chamber. That gives us the vacuum we need to replicate space. The walls, as you can see, are all black. And there are pipes running down the walls. All of those pipes will get flooded with liquid nitrogen, which cools the space down to about -130 degrees.
The chamber takes up to 3 to 4 trucks of liquid nitrogen every day to make sure this chamber stays as cold as we need for the duration of the test.
Raquel Villanueva
Europa Clipper will be in the chamber for over two weeks.
Tony Licari
We will go through phases of testing. We will turn on our solar simulator at different levels of energy to replicate being close to the sun, further out from the sun, and to replicate being out by Jupiter. Three floors below us are 37 lamps that illuminate up through a beam through the wall of the chamber - up to a 25ft mirror - up in the ceiling of the chamber.
That collimates the beam of light down back onto the spacecraft. That light replicates the sun and the solar energy coming from the sun when we're on orbit. Once we're in environments for the test, the systems team will power on the vehicle and test out different instruments to make sure they're operating correctly.
By the end of this test, we hope that the spacecraft is ready for its journey to Jupiter, and it can survive the temperatures on its way out to Jupiter and Europa. I've been on this a very long time, many years spent on this spacecraft, so I'll be very happy, very excited, very sad to see it go. But we want to make sure it's successful when it gets to Jupiter, and we want to make sure it can do its job correctly.