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Europa Clipper is a massive

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spacecraft, but on top of being massive,
it's also kind of pretty.

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Radiation and charging had a lot of
effects on how we designed the spacecraft.

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Therefore, a lot of the harness
is actually wrapped with copper.

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We make the joke that one day somebody
will build beautiful necklaces out of it.

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Additional we.

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It's a size of something you can't hug.

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I make the joke.
Can you hug it? Can you not hug it?

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You can hug the spacecraft.
It's too big around.

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And even the APL portion
sits about ten feet tall,

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so it's pretty large.

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Europa Clipper is powered by massive solar
arrays.

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These things are huge.

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They go diagonally from one
to the other corner of a basketball court.

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Why are they so big?

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When you're this far from the sun?

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You need that much to produce power
for the duration of the mission.

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So my

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role in this mission was radiation
and charging effects.

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What does that mean?

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That means that my job is to make sure
radiation and the effects of charging

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does not kill the spacecraft
or hurt science for this mission.

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That was a big deal. Jupiter.

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So Jupiter radiation belts are really bad,

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roughly, for this mission to get worse
at some peak energies

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that we care about
than what we have around Earth.

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What that means is
we had to change a lot of the way

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we naturally designed things
to be able to withstand that.

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Some materials, they just can't handle
that type of radiation.

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Additionally,
there were aspects of charging effects

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that you really wouldn't
think to be a problem.

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And you can think of charging something
like parking and sparking

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as what we like to call it for fun.

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But those type of energy burst
will really hurt science

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and could disrupt the entire function of a
spacecraft and its materials.

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These instruments will be protected
because we were on this

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from the beginning.

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We knew what their sensitivities were
to the science.

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They're trying to collect.

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Meaning, if you've got certain materials
in a field of view window

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for something like a camera, you'll know
that the interactions that the radiation

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environment has with the materials of,
say, a lens could be a problem.

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And we did a lot of testing
to make sure we would get past

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that, have good science,
and live throughout the mission.

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What excites me the most personally about
this mission is this is my first one.

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And as a radiation engineer,
probably the hardest I will have ever do.

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When I started this program,
my oldest son was six months old,

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and now he's going to stand
beside me at almost ten to see a fly.

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There's nothing greater than that.