Europa Clipper suffered from a fatal flaw till weeks before October launch: Report

NASA's Europa Clipper mission is set to launch for Jupiter next month. Costing $5 billion, the mission has over one hundred-foot-long solar arrays and will examine one of the moons of the gas giant, Europa.

While the historic mission looks set to take off in October, a New York Times report suggests that the Europa spacecraft was found to be suffering from a fatal flaw weeks back. This problem could endanger the entire mission and thwart all chances of studying the ocean moon, the largest planet in the solar system.

Apparently, tests showed that essential transistors in the Europa Clipper would not stand a chance in front of Jupiter's intense radiation and would be immediately destroyed.

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Lead scientist Curt Niebur was informed about this by an urgent email, with the words “First Story” written. This is NASA's way of letting the project staff communicate potentially bad news without fearing an overreaction from the leadership.

When Niebur saw the words in his email, he told NYT that he "opened it right away". “You read it, and then you reply, ‘Thank you for sharing,’ and then you bury your face in a pillow and you howl in terror," he said.

With Europa, NASA wants to study the icy moon which harbours a warm ocean underneath containing twice as much saltwater as on Earth. It aims to learn whether alien life can thrive there.

Also Read:Is Mars missing a moon? Astronomer says Nerio might have created a strange bulge

Jupiter is surrounded by a monstrous magnetosphere. The magnetic field inside it captures charged particles and accelerates them to high velocities, triggering intense radiation that wreaks havoc on electronics.

The problem had arisen with transistors, also known as MOSFETS. They were designed to survive any radiation, but new tests revealed this was not the case and that they were failing in intense radiation environments.

Problem with transistors

MOSFETS, or metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors, are on/off switches found on circuit boards and allow electricity to flow. The problem was figuring out how many of them were in use on the spacecraft and where.

It faced the timeline of being launched in its 21-day window in October or face a massive delay. Besides, replacing all the transistors would have meant many more years and a cost of at least one million dollars.

But NYT reported the scientists as saying that radiation also leads to annealing, which is self-healing. Experiments showed heat from the radiation would lead lightly damaged transistor atoms to spread out and return to their original arrangement. This means they will partially "heal themselves," Joe Stehly, the mission's Project System Engineer, told the NYT.

They suggested paring down the Europa Clipper's flybys and using its electronic instruments only as per need. However, the method wasn't found to be fool-proof. So Jeff Srinivasan, the flight systems manager, took samples of each type of MOSFET and packed them into a "canary box" attached to the spacecraft. This would act as a signal and let scientists know when to shut off certain electronics to avoid radiation damage.

The new plan was put into motion and came together within a month and is expected to work even better than expected.