During these meetings, Culberson
—universally referred to as "Mr. Chairman" during these visits
—would make suggestions and push the scientists to be bold in their design and instrument choices.

He would always ask how much funding they needed
and then deliver that during the next budget cycle.

All of this was happening, more or less, because Culberson felt Clipper was important for the nation.

Eventually, NASA leadership bowed to the inevitable
and made a formal commitment to the Clipper mission.

No longer did Culberson have to include language in budget requests such as
"NASA shall fund" the Clipper,
as the agency was on board.

By the time Culberson lost re-election in 2018
—a midterm election when Democrats gained seats in response to the unpopular first term of former President Donald Trump
—Clipper was far enough along to be secure.

A lot of people bear responsibility for creating Clipper concepts and keeping the idea alive at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at NASA's headquarters in Washington D.C., Brown said.

These include scientists and leaders such as Charles Elachi, Karla Clark, Bob Pappalardo, Louise Proctor, and Curt Niebur.

But Culberson stands alone for getting the mission done.

“Without John Culberson, none of this would have ever happened," Brown said.

"If you want to boil it down to dollars and cents, he’s the man who paid for this thing and got it far enough down the road that it was going to fly."

⭐️What Clipper will do

Clipper's launch on a fully expendable Falcon Heavy rocket, unfortunately,
only marks the end of the beginning for the mission.

It will take 5.5 years for the spacecraft to reach the Jupiter system.

During that time, the spacecraft will traverse a mind-bending 1.8 billion miles
(2.9 billion kilometers).

Once it arrives at Jupiter, the spacecraft will make 80 orbits of Jupiter,
including 49 flybys of Europa.

On some of these passes, the spacecraft will come to within 15 miles (25 km) of the moon's surface,
providing us an incredible view of the #ice and any #plumes.

Plumes, of course, would be incredibly exciting
because they would offer direct evidence of what the subsurface ocean is like.

There is some piecemeal evidence from Galileo,
as well as observations by the Hubble Space Telescope,
that such plumes may be breaking through ice through fissures.

But we just don't know for sure.

Clipper is the largest spacecraft humans have ever launched into deep space.

It never got that nuclear power source,
so it has massive solar arrays that are 45 feet (14 meters) long and 15 feet (4.5 meters) tall.

You could comfortably play a game of pick-up basketball on a court that size.

The spacecraft carries a sophisticated suite of instruments,
including a powerful ice-penetrating radar that will study the interface between the icy crust and ocean
and possibly identify pond or lake-like features there.

Although this is not a life-detection mission,
scientists could get really lucky and find the signatures of life in a plume
or on the surface.

In all likelihood, however, they will simply characterize the world and its ocean,
with the intent of coming back in the (distant) future with a lander
to make in-situ measurements and possibly detect life.

Most exciting of all, however, is that Clipper truly is flying into the unknown.

This is a mission of pure discovery to one of the most exciting worlds near Earth.

Whenever we explore a new place in space, nature always surprises us.

"We have always uncovered things that we could not imagine," Bonnie Buratti, the deputy project scientist for Clipper, said during a recent briefing.

Indeed.

Europa has many secrets, and we're finally coming for them.

#EuropaClipper
-- Eric Berger