Europa Clipper mission has launched on October 14th, 2024, toward the Jupiter moon Europa.

RSLab is part of the team of REASON (Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface), which is one of the main instruments on-board Europa Clipper. REASON is designed for probing Europa’s icy shell for the moon’s suspected ocean and studying the ice’s structure and thickness. The data acquired by REASON together with the data taken by RIME (Radar for Icy Mooon Exploration, under the RSLab leadership) on-board the ESA JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) spacecraft (currently in cruise toward the Jupiter system) will contribute to discover the subsurface world of the Jupiter icy moons, which is stimulating the imagination of scientists and science fiction since very long time.

The two radars, REASON and RIME, were conceived in the phase in which Juice and Europa Clipper were part of the joint EJSM mission (Europa Jupiter System Mission) which envisaged a close collaboration between ESA and NASA for the synergistic development of two probes, one from send into orbit around Ganymede (ESA’s) and the other around Europa (NASA’s). For programmatic reasons the joint mission was then separated into the two independent missions Europa Clipper and Juice, but the collaboration continued to optimize the complementarities and differences of the two radars and the related scientific objectives. With the launch of Europa Clipper, which follows that of Juice, the initial plan to have two probes dedicated to the study of Jupiter’s icy moons is effectively realized and completed.

Go Europa Clipper!

Image credits: NASA