Spacecraft Makers: Sewing Blankets for NASA’s Europa Clipper

See how a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sews and installs thermal blankets to protect the agency’s Europa Clipper spacecraft from the cold and harsh environment it will face around Jupiter as it investigates the planet’s ice-encrusted moon Europa. In this episode of the Spacecraft Makers video series, Mark Duran and Morgan Betsill provide a behind-the-scenes look at JPL’s “Shield Shop,” where layers of the thermal blankets come together before they are installed on the spacecraft. Then, these custom blankets are carefully fitted onto the spacecraft in a clean room at JPL. 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 will explore this icy moon of Jupiter to see if there are conditions suitable for life. The spacecraft needs to be hardy enough to survive a 1.6 billion-mile, six-year journey to Jupiter – and sophisticated enough to perform a detailed science investigation of Europa once it arrives at the Jupiter system in 2030. Europa Clipper is expected to launch in October 2024 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When the spacecraft is in JPL’s clean room, viewers also can watch a 24-hour live feed of the spacecraft here. For more information on the mission go to: https://europa.nasa.gov/. For more information on this video series, which focuses on how space missions come together, visit https://bit.ly/49MWe54. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech