Europa Clipper is a massive
spacecraft, but on top of being massive, it's also kind of pretty.
Radiation and charging had a lot of effects on how we designed the spacecraft.
Therefore, a lot of the harness is actually wrapped with copper.
We make the joke that one day somebody will build beautiful necklaces out of it.
Additional we.
It's a size of something you can't hug.
I make the joke. Can you hug it? Can you not hug it?
You can hug the spacecraft. It's too big around.
And even the APL portion sits about ten feet tall,
so it's pretty large.
Europa Clipper is powered by massive solar arrays.
These things are huge.
They go diagonally from one to the other corner of a basketball court.
Why are they so big?
When you're this far from the sun?
You need that much to produce power for the duration of the mission.
So my
role in this mission was radiation and charging effects.
What does that mean?
That means that my job is to make sure radiation and the effects of charging
does not kill the spacecraft or hurt science for this mission.
That was a big deal. Jupiter.
So Jupiter radiation belts are really bad,
roughly, for this mission to get worse at some peak energies
that we care about than what we have around Earth.
What that means is we had to change a lot of the way
we naturally designed things to be able to withstand that.
Some materials, they just can't handle that type of radiation.
Additionally, there were aspects of charging effects
that you really wouldn't think to be a problem.
And you can think of charging something like parking and sparking
as what we like to call it for fun.
But those type of energy burst will really hurt science
and could disrupt the entire function of a spacecraft and its materials.
These instruments will be protected because we were on this
from the beginning.
We knew what their sensitivities were to the science.
They're trying to collect.
Meaning, if you've got certain materials in a field of view window
for something like a camera, you'll know that the interactions that the radiation
environment has with the materials of, say, a lens could be a problem.
And we did a lot of testing to make sure we would get past
that, have good science, and live throughout the mission.
What excites me the most personally about this mission is this is my first one.
And as a radiation engineer, probably the hardest I will have ever do.
When I started this program, my oldest son was six months old,
and now he's going to stand beside me at almost ten to see a fly.
There's nothing greater than that.