Sherrard grad’s work protecs Europa Clipper, orbiter heading to Jupiter

NASA's newest mission is taking an orbiter to study one of Jupiter's moons for signs of life, and a contractor from the QCA helped with its development.

The Europa Clipper launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, October 14, heading for Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. The mission's goals are to learn more about the ice shell covering the moon, as well as its composition and geology. The Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission. It has large solar arrays to collect light for its power needs as it operates in the Jupiter system, which is over five times as far from the Sun as Earth. It's about 16 feet tall and the spacecraft spans more than 100 feet with its arrays deployed. It has a dry mass (no propellant in the tanks) of 7,145 pounds.

Rayme Traub, BAE Space Systems Manager and NASA Aerospace Engineer who attended school in Sherrard, spoke with Our Quad Cities News via Zoom to discuss the mission and the vital part he played in it. He said he always wanted to work in the space industry somehow, a plan he shared with a friend from school who was chasing his own career dream. "It's funny, because a good friend of mine, Steven, he's actually a director in the Moline School District. Me and him went to school together since first grade, best friends/ We always had a joke, you know, I'm going to be in the space stuff, and he's going to be wanting to do on the education. And we both met our dreams." He began working as a contractor a few years ago and "gosh, it's amazing now." Traub worked to develop the radiation shielding that protects the Europa Clipper from radiation, something vital during the trip to Europa and especially during the mission. "It's a radiation shielding that encompasses all the sensitive equipment and the electronics that have to be protected from the extreme pressure, or vacuum, of space, cold, etc, but also the radiation of Jupiter. A lot of people don't realize that Jupiter is the second biggest producer of radiation in the whole solar system, the sun obviously being the first one. When we get there, we're going to be actually orbiting Jupiter, and we're making flybys. We do that because whenever you have the craft within the vicinity of Europa, Io, etc, but Europa in this case, the radiation is actually more intense because of the radiation belts. Right now, I think it's scheduled to be about 50 passes we'll be doing over the several years after we arrive." The Europa Clipper is expected to arrive at its destination by April 2030. Some of the planned flybys will take the Clipper within 16 miles of the surface. A different part of the moon will be scanned in each pass so most of the moon will be mapped by the end of the mission.

The mission's goal is to look for signs of potential life in the deep waters covering the moon. "What we are looking for are signs of potential life that is habitable below the icy crust of Europa. I can't exactly say for sure, but it's believed to be around 15 to 20 miles deep, probably deeper in some areas. But below that is around 100 miles deep. To put that in perspective, the Mariana Trench, the deepest part in the world on Earth, is about seven miles so if someone would drive from Davenport to Iowa City and then back to Davenport, you are pretty close to the depth of the ocean of what we think is there. We're actually looking for amino acids, and then maybe even beyond that, we can go to the protein structures, if we can see those."

The probe will hopefully be able to fly close enough to directly scan water erupting from the surface. "There are water vapor plumes that actually eject from Europa's surface that we're going to try to fly through," Traub said. "The intention is to fly through those and in doing so, we might be able to gather and collect some of these amino acids, or whatever we might find." The plumes come from ocean pressure that forces itself to the surface. "That's actually how Europa actually creates heat, not because of the sun, but because of the tidal forces, kind of like the moon on the Earth, how we have tides, low tide, high tide."

He said he's been getting suggestions from people about shielding material. "I've been getting questions from my friends and some family members, hey, why aren't you using lead? Well, there's two problems there. Lead is extremely heavy. The second thing is, lead actually can produce what they call secondary radiation. What I mean by secondary radiation, is actually, a phenomenon called Bremsstrahlung radiation. This occurs when high-energy ps knock electrons out of lead atoms, releasing energy in the form of radiation and damaging the spacecraft's electronics. We actually opted for mostly aluminum, but it does have some zinc alloy in there. So, it's an aluminum zinc alloy."

There's no return trip for the Clipper once the mission is over, Traub said, "It's kind of sad at the very end of it. We'll actually end up crashing the orbiter. It won't be with us forever. The plan right now is to crash into the moon of Jupiter, Ganymede."

Traub is already hard at work on the next project. "I'm going to be working with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. That's the next thing on my list, probably until around Christmas time. They're working on the optics systems for the telescope, which will eventually replace the Hubble Telescope. "It'll be around 100 times greater visibility on the night sky than what we currently have. So that'll be a very big improvement on what we'll be able to see, what we capture, things of that nature."

He fondly remembers the teachers at Sherrard that nurtured his interest in space. "Mr. Kovac was a huge inspiration of mine. He was my very first science teacher. Couldn't say much, you know, bad things about him. He's been always there on my side, and he's awesome. And then there's Barry Jackson, again, science teacher. And then there's Miss Crippen. And then there was also Miss Kelly. All four of them had a unique spot in my heart there at Sherrard. They treated me good and kept pushing."

Family was also a career inspiration. "Honestly, one of the biggest inspirations I have is my uncle, who actually passed away last year. He worked for JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories) for many years in the 70s. Listening to stories from him growing up, honestly, probably put me in the path of wanting to work doing what I do now." Now Traub is passing on the love of space to his five year old daughter Renata, who he calls "Starshine."

Click here to follow the Europa Clipper's mission blog.