Solar System

Spacecraft Makers: How We Keep Europa Clipper Super Clean

Sept. 5, 2024

A team of specialists in a field known as planetary protection has been working to keep NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft as clean as possible as it is prepared for launch. This effort is crucial, as the spacecraft will make dozens of flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, where an ocean beneath the icy crust may possess the essential ingredients for life. Although the spacecraft will not come into contact with the moon’s surface, planetary protection protocols are in place to safeguard Europa’s environment, as well as the other planets and moons Europa Clipper will fly by.

The practice of planetary protection involves carefully controlling any exposure other solar system bodies have to Earth life. To minimize the possible introduction of microbes from Earth to Europa, numerous samples have been collected from the Europa Clipper throughout its construction. These samples are tested to ensure compliance with planetary protection protocols.

In this episode, Akemi Hinzer from the Planetary Protection Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory walks through the team’s meticulous process.

Spacecraft Makers is a video series that takes audiences behind the scenes to learn more about how space missions, like Europa Clipper, come together.

Europa Clipper is expected to launch in October 2024 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and arrive in the Jupiter system in 2030.

For more information on the mission go to: https://europa.nasa.gov/.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Transcript

RAQUEL VILLANUEVA
JPL DIGITAL NEWS
The Europa Clipper spacecraft spent months protected in clean rooms. It's actually never been exposed to outside air. We'll show you why cleanliness matters so much for its journey to Jupiter's icy moon.

SPACECRAFT MAKERS
AKEMI HINZER
EUROPA CLIPPER PLANETARY PROTECTION SCIENTIST

I have the coolest job on Europa Clipper. I keep the spacecraft biologically clean. This means I am looking to reduce the amount of bacteria that are stuck to the spacecraft.

[Raquel Villanueva] Strong evidence suggests Europa may have an ocean beneath its icy crust. So, Akemi and her team need to keep the spacecraft as biologically clean as possible to help protect this environment, as well as the other planets and moons Europa Clipper will encounter.

[Akemi Hinzer] We're really helped by this awesome clean room here. It does a lot of the work for us. We also monitor everything that's being brought into the clean room. Everything is very tightly controlled. It's cleaned before it comes in, and we sample anything that is going to come close to the spacecraft.

STEP 1: COLLECT SAMPLES

The rules of the game are we're sampling in three different directions and each different direction gets a different face of this wipe. We want to give ourselves the best chance to pick up any bacteria that might be on here.

This is the lab where we process all of our flight support samples.

We want to get the samples back to our lab as soon as possible, because we want to capture this look at our samples before any bacteria can die.

STEP 2: TRANSFER

So I need to take this wipe that we used to sample the spacecraft surfaces and get it into this bottle. And then I'll add some soapy water to this.

STEP 3: SHAKE

And then from there we're going to shake off all of the bacteria into that soapy water. We physically shake it. And then we also use the sonicator. We are using sound to finely shake all of the last little bacteria off into our soapy water.

STEP 4: HEAT SHOCK

RYAN HENDRICKSON
EUROPA CLIPPER PLANETARY PROTECTION ENGINEER LEAD
And then we move to the next step: heat shock. What we're trying to do here is kill off all of the weaker types of bacteria, and leave just the hardy bacteria.

STEP 5: FILTER

[Akemi Hinzer] Next we're going to filter this. The liquid will filter through and the bacteria will stick on top of the filter. From there, we put that onto a plate of bacteria food the consistency of jello.

STEP 6: GROW

From there we let it grow for three days. We count every 24 hours for three days. This is where we're sitting when we're counting the colonies.

STEP 7: COUNT

So we would sit here and you're able to see pretty closely. They are really diverse, actually. They come in different colors. They can be tall and ridge-y or really circular and smooth. Some of them really spread out. We use that number to estimate the number of microbes living on the spacecraft.

Think of Europa's ocean like a nature reserve. We don't want to contaminate it with anything from Earth.

[Ryan Hendrickson] Out of the thousands of samples that we've collected, only about a dozen have required us to ask the engineers to re-clean the hardware so that we could go in and resample it.

[Raquel Villanueva] By the time Europa Clipper launches, the spacecraft will have been sampled over 3,000 times by multiple planetary protection teams.

PLANETARY PROTECTION TEAM - JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY

They estimate it will have less than 350,000 spores. For scale, that only takes up about half the tip of a ballpoint pen.

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