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Here's a link to Scott Manley's report on the SpaceX launch of Europa Clipper with a detailed description of the scientific instrumentation onboard and the goals of the mission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYieX09IgXw
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The Europa mission will last for years, and there should be many opportunities for for updates.
(th)
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This update is from a gent at NASA ... it is about study of a mass ejection from the Sun that Europa Clipper helped to observe.
The update is from LinkedIn, which NewMarsMember joined a while back.
Joe Westlake • 3rd+Director, Heliophysics Division at NASA | Space
weather, flight instrumentation, and the science that will enable
humanity’s desire to explore the cosmos
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-westlake
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In December 2024, something extraordinary happened during a routine
instrument checkout aboard Europa Clipper. PIMS—the Plasma Instrument for
Magnetic Sounding—detected a hidden component of a complex coronal mass
ejection that Earth-based observations alone couldn't fully resolve. It
took 17 spacecraft distributed across the inner heliosphere to piece
together the full structure of that eruption.This component affected not just Europa Clipper but Mars, demonstrating how
complexity ramps up as humanity reaches farther into the solar system -
this complex CME structure could endanger a crewed mission in the
magnetosphere, on the Moon, and at Mars. But here's what makes this moment
matter: we keep finding that space weather is far more complex, more
asymmetric, and more difficult to predict than we believed. Every mission
we fly teaches us something new about the true architecture of solar
eruptions.This is the power of NASA's science armada. While our planet-based networks
do extraordinary work, distributed spacecraft throughout the solar system
see what no single vantage point can capture. That's how we learn.Adrienn Luspay-Kuti and the PIMS team have given us proof of concept, first
light, and a compelling lesson in heliospheric complexity, all at once.
Adrienn's now leading PIMS as PI, and this result shows exactly why that
instrument matters for Europa Clipper's core mission. PIMS and the Europa
Clipper Magnetometer will determine Europa's subsurface ocean thickness,
conductivity, and ice shell thickness—but they're also teaching us about
the space environment we're flying through to get there.Congratulations to Adrienn and the team. This is the kind of science that
changes how we think.
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