After decades of dreaming of Jupiter Moon Europe and the Great Ocean, which is probably hidden under his icy surface, scientists are now about to send a spaceship there. NASA confirmed yesterday that the Europa Clipper Mission would be started as planned after there were concerns that there could be considerable delays due to possibly incorrect transistors on the 5 billion dollar spaceship.

"We are confident that our beautiful spaceship and the capable team are ready for the start operations and our comprehensive science mission on Europe," said Laurie Leshin, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA in Pasadena, California, at a press conference on September 9th.

with a mass of over 3.2 tons, a height of about 5 meters and a width of more than 30 meters with fully developed solar modules, Europe Clipper is the largest spaceship that Nasa has ever built for a planetary mission. Yesterday the mission passed the so -called "Key Decision Point E" - the last review that must be run through before the start. The start window for the spaceship begins on October 10th.

The surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europe.

If the orbiter is successfully lifts next month, it will reach Jupiter in April 2030. His nine instruments will then examine both the icy crust of Europe and the ocean, by the scientist that he lies below to determine whether the moon, as we know it, could support. Earlier missions have indicated 1 , that the icy surface of Europe with more salt-like water with more as the double amount of water from the earthly oceans hidden. The cracked, apparently young surface of the moon also indicates that the satellite has an active geology - which indicates that Europe's internal and dynamic enough for the complex chemistry of life could be.

"There is no device like a tricorder-a fictional instrument from the Star Trek universe-which we can focus on something to show whether it is alive," said Curt Niebur, the Europe Clipper program scientist at the NASA headquarters in Washington DC during the press conference. "It is extremely difficult to prove life, especially from orbit," he added. "First we will ask the simple question: Are the right ingredients for the existence of life?"

difficulties on the way to an ocean world

Europe Clipper had already experienced a number of setbacks. 2019 angry NASA the scientists by giving away a complex magnetometer from the spaceship and this with budget problems. For years, the mission was in uncertainty about how it would get into Space. This was due to the fact that the US congress had long prescribed that the spacecraft on board the slower than expected Space Launch had to fly system rocket from NASA. Finally, the US legislature 2020 allowed the reliable Falcon Heavy rocket of the private company SpaceX in Brownsville, Texas to select for the start.

The possible transistor problem In May this year, as a nasa engineering, that batches of a specific transistor type that were already installed in the Europe clipper spaceship did not work properly. These components, called MOSFET (metal oxide-helicopters field effect transistors), act in electrical circuits such as switches. They come from a NASA supplier, the Infineon company based in Neubiberg, Germany.

Since the Europa Clipper will fly past Europe 49 times, flying at intervals of up to 25 kilometers, the spaceship must also fly through a salt of invited particles that are accelerated by Jupiter magnetic field, which is about 20,000 times stronger than that of the earth. This means that the electronics in the orbiter must be radiation resistant.

In May, however, NASA said that she was checking whether the mission's transistors were a risk of malfunctions. The agency started four months of intensive tests around the clock at three different locations: JPL; the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland; and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It was a huge challenge, and I think that 'huge challenge' is a massive understatement," said Leshin.

After the evaluation of replacement mosfets from the same batches that were installed in the Europe Clipper, NASA found that the circuits of the spaceship would work as expected. This conclusion is partly based on the fact that the spaceship only immerses in the strongest radiation in Jupiter every 21 days during the first half of its four -year basic mission. For the rest of the time, the transistors of the orbiter can sometimes heal themselves when they are gently heated, by a process that is referred to as recrystallization.

"While Europe places in the radiation environment, it comes out long enough so that these transistors have the opportunity to regenerate and partly recover between the flights," said Jordan Evans, the project manager of Europa Clipper at the JPL during the conference. "We can - I have great confidence in it, and the data confirms this - the original mission."