NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, set to launch in 2024, will travel 2.8 billion miles to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, exploring its life-supporting potential. The mission will use a high-gain antenna to transmit data to Earth and study the lunar atmosphere, ice shell and subsurface ocean over approximately 50 flights.

When NASA’s Europa Clipper orbits Jupiter, transmitting science data and receiving commands from Earth hundreds of millions of miles away, it will need a powerful antenna. On June 17, technicians installed the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna at the Hazardous Payload Service Center at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Europa Clipper is planned to be released later this year. It will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to Jupiter. It is the largest spacecraft designed by NASA for a planetary mission. Scheduled to arrive in April 2030, the probe will examine the gas giant’s icy moon Europa to determine its life-supporting potential.

Advanced communication technologies

The spacecraft will make approximately 50 flybys of Europa, allowing nine science instruments to collect data on the moon’s atmosphere, icy crust and underlying ocean. A roughly 10-foot (3-meter) dish and several small antennas will transmit data to Earth; a journey that will take about 45 minutes once the spacecraft enters Jupiter’s orbit.

To provide Europa Clipper with the necessary bandwidth, the antenna will operate on NASA’s X-band 7.2 and 8.4 (GHz) and Ka-band 32 (GHz) deep space radio frequencies via the Deep Space Network, the agency’s global network. Large radio antennas communicate with dozens of spacecraft in the solar system.

Investigating the possibility of settlement in our solar system

Europa Clipper underscores NASA’s commitment to exploring our solar system for habitable conditions beyond Earth. Although Europa Clipper’s mission is not to detect life, understanding the habitability of Europa will help us better understand how life developed on Earth and whether we are likely to find conditions that could support life beyond our planet.

NASA Kennedy technicians will continue to prepare the spacecraft for its mission and perform final checks in preparation for launch. Europa Clipper is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center 39A before October 2024.

Mission development and management

The Europa Clipper high-gain antenna was developed by Johns Hopkins University’s APL (Applied Physics Laboratory) in Laurel, Maryland, and aerospace supplier AASC (Applied Aerospace Structures Corporation) in Stockton, California.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led by the Cal Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, is leading the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with APL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft’s main body was developed by APL in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Europa Clipper mission program. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy, manages the launch service for the Europa Clipper spacecraft.