NASA video shows a space probe’s wild journey around the world’s oceans

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is in for a wild ride.

The launch of this mission to explore the ocean world Europa – a moon of Jupiter that may host an ocean twice as much volume of all the Earth’s seas – has been interrupted by the massive Hurricane Milton, but its 1.8 billion mile journey is imminent. The spacecraft will fly close to Europa’s cracked, icy shell nearly 50 times, using an array of high-resolution cameras, a ground-penetrating radar and even a device that literally samples particles of Europa ejected into space by tiny meteorites.

The mission will collect extensive information sufficient to determine whether Europa offers conditions under its ice cover that could support life.

“It may be one of the best places outside Earth to look for life in our solar system,” Cynthia Phillips, a NASA planetary geologist and project associate on the space agency’s Europa Clipper mission, told Mashable.

The repeated reconnaissance requires the spacecraft to make perfectly timed loops around Jupiter as it intersects Europa’s orbit, which NASA shows in the animation below.

Here’s what you’re watching (a short ad plays first):

– Middle orange dot: Jupiter

Destructible speed of light

– Blue dot: Europe

– Gray, red and yellow dots: Each of Jupiter’s other three large moons – Io, Ganymede and Callisto

– Magenta: This is Europa Clipper “stepping in and out,” NASA explained.

There is also a timestamp at the top right showing the mission’s planned flight between April and July 2032.

This looped trajectory is also intended to limit the spacecraft’s exposure to extreme radiation. “The charged particle environment at the Europa site is immense,” Phillips said.

That’s because Jupiter, a gas giant planet 317 times more massive than Earth, produces a massive magnetic field that shoots between 600,000 and 2 million miles (1 to 3 million kilometers) toward the sun. It is created by the planet’s liquid metal core rotating and generating electrical currents (moving electrical charges create magnetic fields). Crucially, this magnetic field picks up particles from the relentless solar wind – a stream of fast-moving charged particles emitted by the Sun – and then accelerates them, creating strong radiation belts around Jupiter, as shown above.

“You’re coming out of this.”

(Decades ago, during the Voyager mission, NASA engineers worried that the spacecraft might fly past Jupiter. A person hypothetically traveling aboard Voyager as it flew past Jupiter would have been hit by a dose of radiation 1,000 times the deadly level.)

Not all of Europa Clipper’s electronics and software can be housed in a metal vault. So flying by the moon for relatively short periods of time will limit the impact of charged particles that can damage computer chips and electronics. During each orbit around Jupiter, the spacecraft will spend less than a day in an irradiated zone before crashing. You will only return after two to three weeks.

“Come out of there,” Phillips said.

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After traveling through the solar system, the spacecraft is expected to reach Jupiter in 2030 and begin its orbital dance through the Jupiter system soon after. If it appears habitable, NASA plans to return to Europa and land a robot on the ice crust. Such an undertaking would involve drilling into the ice to see if the moon exists inhabited.