Big NASA spacecraft is headed to a dangerous region of the solar system

The Europa Clipper spacecraft flying by the Jovian moon, Europa, with dominant Jupiter in the distance.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

The brains of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft are stored in a metal vault.

It’s where the large exploration vehicle — the length of a basketball court — safeguards its computers, software, and many electronics. The craft is about to launch to Jupiter’s moon Europa, a world planetary scientists suspect harbors an ocean twice the volume of Earth’s. With around 50 close swoops by Europa, NASA will be able to confidently answer the question of whether this ocean realm also hosts the ingredients, such as an energy source and telltale materials, to support life.

Yet the radiation environs there are particularly harsh.

“The charged particle environment at Europa’s location is immense,” Cynthia Phillips, a NASA planetary geologist and project staff scientist for the space agency’s Europa Clipper mission, told Mashable.

Jupiter, a gas giant planet 317 times more massive than Earth, generates a massive magnetic field shooting out between 600,000 to 2 million miles (1 to 3 million kilometers) toward the sun. It’s created by the planet’s liquid metal core, which spins and creates electrical currents (moving electric charges make magnetic fields). Crucially, this magnetic field grabs and then accelerates particles from the relentless solar wind — a stream of rapidly traveling charged particles emitted by the sun — which creates potent radiation belts around Jupiter.

“It bombards everything.”

Any craft traveling around the planet will almost certainly pass through these hazardous zones and expose instruments to harmful particles, which can damage computer chips and electronics. “It bombards everything,” Curt Niebur, Europa Clipper’s program scientist, said at a press conference leading up to the mission’s launch. Decades ago, during the Voyager mission, NASA’s engineers were worried about the craft passing by Jupiter. A person hypothetically riding aboard Voyager as it passed Jupiter would have gotten hit with a radiation dose 1,000 times the lethal level.

A depiction of Jupiter’s sprawling magnetic field. If was visible to the naked eye, “it would appear two to three times the size of the sun or moon to viewers on Earth,” NASA explained.
Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center