Behind the Spacecraft: Europa Clipper (Teaser Trailer)

Meet some of the engineers contributing to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which will study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa to see if it has conditions suitable to support life. This trailer is an introduction to the team members profiled in the “Behind the Spacecraft: Europa Clipper” video series.

Each of the five episodes will take you behind the scenes with an engineer on the mission: Jenny Kampmeier, Sarah Elizabeth McCandless, Valeria Salazar, Dipak Srinivasan, and Andres Rivera. Their roles range from navigating to communicating with the spacecraft. Learn how these engineers came to join the mission and how they hope to inspire future generations.

Europa Clipper is set to launch in October 2024 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will arrive at Jupiter in 2030. The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, with key spacecraft infrastructure contributions from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

For more information on the mission, visit: https://europa.nasa.gov/

Humans can be pretty smart and we do discover a lot of great things but there is still so much
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that we don't know. This is like one of the most exciting times to be working in space.
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I feel very fortunate and privileged to be supporting this mission. Europa Clipper is NASA's Flagship mission
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to explore a moon of Jupiter called Europa. Here's our Europa Clipper spacecraft being built.
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How do you build a spacecraft to go visit a world that exists inside of this extreme environment?
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What we're looking for is what's underneath the surface. My name is Valeria Salazar and I help put together all
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the hundreds of different components that make up Europa Clipper. My name is Andres Rivera. My name is Jenny Kampmeier.
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My name is Sarah Elizabeth McCandless and I am an interplanetary navigator. I'm Dipak Srinivasan and
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I work to make sure that we can communicate with the Europa Clipper spacecraft. I'm making sure that
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Europa Clipper makes its way to Jupiter safely. I work on Europa Clipper helping science fiction
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become science reality. We're going to Europa to determine whether we have favorable conditions for life.
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Here on Earth, no matter what environment you're in wherever there's water we found life.
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We're going to investigate all those ingredients that we think have led to life as a whole.
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But to actually do that a lot of engineering has to happen. There's no one person that is responsible
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for getting this spacecraft built, for designing our science campaigns. I'm helping enable solar
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system exploration, helping to enable exploration of the universe. We're doing some really humanity-changing science.
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It's a hard journey to get here. It felt like an impossible dream.
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For me personally, being an immigrant, I never really imagined that I would have
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the opportunity to participate in something like this. Just seeing it up here and knowing
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that it's going to be up in space it's pretty humbling. Seeing it from its infancy to actual
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realized hardware to get that on its journey to Europa, it's just going to be a wonderful feeling.
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It's been very motivating to see that a part of me will go to Jupiter.
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I'm contributing this, this tiny part of something that's going to help us understand better about our universe.
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We're going to be exploring literally the frontiers of life. Who knows what mission today
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is going to be that inspiration for the next generation?
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That's such an honor to be a part of.
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NASA.