Nasa’s Crew-8 mission has safely returned to Earth after 236 days in space. The team, consisting of Nasa astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, successfully splashed down off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, marking the end of their extensive mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which carried the crew back to Earth, completed its deorbit burn as planned, with splashdown confirmed at 3.29am EDT. The mission saw the crew orbit Earth 3,776 times, covering an impressive distance of approximately 100 million miles. During their time aboard the ISS, they witnessed the arrival and departure of eight spacecraft, reflecting the ongoing operations at the station.

Smooth descent and landing
The final phase of the crew’s return proceeded smoothly. At around 18,000 feet in altitude, the drogue parachutes were deployed, slowing the spacecraft from 350 miles per hour. Shortly after, the main parachutes were deployed at 6,000 feet, further decelerating the spacecraft to a safe speed of 119 miles per hour, ensuring a controlled and secure splashdown.
The crew had undocked from the ISS’s Harmony module earlier, at 5.05pm EDT, beginning their journey back home aboard the Dragon spacecraft.
What is SpaceX’s Dragon?
SpaceX’s Dragon is capable of carrying up to seven passengers to and from orbit. It remains the only operational spacecraft capable of returning significant cargo back to Earth. The Dragon made history as the first privately developed spacecraft to transport humans to the space station.
Equipped with two drogue and four main parachutes, the Dragon ensures a safe reentry and descent for its crew, maintaining SpaceX’s reputation for reliable and efficient spacecraft operations.

Space tourism is quickly becoming a reality as companies around the world work to make commercial space flights accessible to the public. With the growing interest in private space exploration, more firms are entering the market, offering unique opportunities for civilians to experience the wonders of space. From suborbital flights to longer-term plans for lunar missions, the race to make space travel more affordable and frequent is accelerating.Among the players in this industry, Chinese companies are making significant strides, contributing to the global competition in space exploration.
Deep Blue Aerospace, a leading Chinese aerospace company, will begin selling two tickets for its highly anticipated commercial spaceflight, scheduled for 2027. Each ticket is priced at 1.5 million yuan (roughly $211,000), offering passengers the opportunity to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in space.

Space tourism tickets available via livestream event

The tickets will be available for purchase starting at 6:00 pm local time (10:00 GMT). Sales will take place during a livestream shopping event hosted by the company’s founder, Huo Liang. This was announced through Deep Blue Aerospace’s WeChat account earlier this week. To secure a seat, buyers must pay a 50,000 yuan deposit.
The spaceflight will be suborbital, meaning passengers will reach the edge of space but will not enter a full orbit around Earth. Passengers will spend about 12 minutes in space, with five of those minutes experiencing zero gravity.

Deep Blue Aerospace focuses on reusable rocket technology in China’s growing space sector

Deep Blue Aerospace aims to reduce the cost of space travel by developing reusable rocket technology, following in the footsteps of companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Reusability is seen as a major breakthrough in lowering the expenses of launching commercial space flights.
China is rapidly expanding its commercial space sector. According to state media, the country conducted 26 commercial launches in 2023. Among these was LandSpace’s Zhuque-2 rocket, the first rocket in the world to use methane fuel. Deep Blue Aerospace is a key player in this burgeoning market.

China’s expanding space industry and government-backed ambitions

Several companies have entered China’s commercial space industry in recent years. In May 2023, another firm, CAS Space, announced plans to offer space tourism flights by 2028, adding to the growing interest in space travel within the country.
While commercial companies make strides, China’s government-backed space program has ambitious plans of its own. The country aims to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, with the long-term goal of building a lunar base. These projects highlight China’s drive to compete in space exploration on a global scale.
Also Read | NASA and SpaceX prepare for the undocking of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission: Know the significance, when and where to watch

SpaceX achieved a significant milestone by successfully launching its colossal Starship rocket and catching the returning booster using mechanical arms at the launch pad on Sunday. The empty Starship, standing nearly 400 feet (121 meters) tall, lifted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. Like its four predecessors, the rocket arced over the Gulf of Mexico, but unlike them, it did not end up being destroyed during liftoff or while attempting to land in the sea.
This time, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, raised the stakes by attempting to bring the first-stage booster back to the launch pad from which it had taken off just seven minutes earlier.The launch tower is equipped with massive metal arms, nicknamed “chopsticks,” designed to catch the descending 232-foot (71-meter) booster. As the booster slowly lowered itself into the arms of the launch tower, company employees erupted in cheers.
“The tower has caught the rocket!!” Musk announced via X.
The flight director had the responsibility of deciding, in real-time and with manual control, whether to attempt the landing. SpaceX said that both the booster and launch tower needed to be in good and stable condition for the catch to be attempted. If not, the booster would have ended up in the gulf like its predecessors.

Fortunately, everything was deemed ready for the catch. The stainless steel spacecraft on top, with its retro appearance, continued its journey around the world once separated from the booster, aiming for a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, where it would sink to the bottom. The entire flight was expected to last just over an hour.
SpaceX has been successfully recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida and California. But these boosters typically land on floating ocean platforms or concrete slabs several miles away from their launch pads, not directly on them.
By recycling Falcon boosters, SpaceX has accelerated its launch rate and saved millions of dollars. Musk intends to apply the same approach to Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, featuring 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone.
Nasa has already ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade, and SpaceX plans to use Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually, Mars.

Dodging stormy weather ahead of Hurricane Milton, SpaceX launched the European Space Agency’s $398 million Hera probe Monday on a follow-up flight to find out precisely how a moonlet orbiting a small asteroid was affected by the high-speed impact of NASA’s DART probe in 2022.

The launching was in doubt until the last moment, with thick clouds and rain across Florida’s Space Coast, fueled by moisture pulled in by the intensifying hurricane to the west.

But as the launch time approached, conditions improved enough to satisfy launch safety rules and NASA managers cleared the rocket for takeoff. Right on time, at 10:52 a.m. EDT, the Falcon 9’s first stage engines ignited with a burst of flame and the booster climbed smoothly away from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Liftoff came in the nick of time for several hundred European Space Agency managers, scientists, engineers and journalists who flew to Florida to watch the launch.

Hurricane Milton is expected to bring extreme winds and torrential rain to Florida’s Space Coast by Wednesday, a forecast that prompted NASA to stand down on plans to launch the agency’s $5.2 billion Europa mission to Jupiter and its ice-covered moon Europa on Thursday.

Instead, NASA announced late Sunday the rocket and it costly payload will remain in a SpaceX hangar at the base of launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center until Milton passes by and safety personnel have a chance to inspect spaceport facilities for signs of damage.

The weather also has thrown a wrench into NASA’s plans to bring three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut back to Earth after a 217-day stay aboard the International Space Station.

Crew 8 commander Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, Jeanette Epps and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin had planned to undock Monday.

But NASA announced Sunday their departure would be delayed to at least Thursday because of the expected bad weather. Crew Dragon ferry ships require calm winds and seas in the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean to permit a safe splashdown.

Mission to an asteroid and its moon

In the meantime, despite an initially grim forecast, SpaceX was able to take advantage of a break in the weather to kick off Hera’s two-year voyage to the asteroid Didymos and its small moon Dimorphos.

The DART impact altered the 11-hour 55-minute orbit of the 495-foot-wide Dimorphos, shaving 31 minutes off the time needed to complete one trip around the parent asteroid Didymos. The test confirmed the feasibility of someday nudging a threatening asteroid off course before a possibly devastating Earth impact.

But a successful deflection would depend on a variety of factors, including when the threat was detected — the farther out, the better — and the asteroid’s composition.

ESA’s Hera probe will orbit the Didymos system and study both asteroids in detail with 11 high-tech cameras and other instruments, deploying two small “cubesat” satellites to study the interior structure of Dimorphos, assess the DART impact crater, the moon’s internal structure and composition.

The goal of the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment, or AIDA, is to better understand the techniques that might be needed to prevent an Earth impact.

“The good news is no dinosaur killer is on its way to Earth during the next 100 years,” said 
Richard Moissl, director of ESA’s Planetary Defense Office. “We are safe from that scenario, but there are smaller ones, especially in this dangerous size, 50 meters and upwards, where it really threatens human life on the ground.”

The first step in planetary defense is detection, he said, followed by detailed observations to pin down the asteroid’s orbit and determine whether a collision with Earth is a possibility.

“For small objects, civil protection is the way to go,” he said. “But 50 meters (160 feet across) and larger, you really want this thing not to hit Earth, not to threaten population centers. And then step three comes into play, deflection.

“But again, it’s always good to know what you’re up against. And this is where Hera and DART come into play.”

Unlike most Falcon 9 flights, there were no plans to recover the rocket’s first stage. To give Hera the velocity need to break free of Earth gravity, the Falcon 9’s two stages were programmed to use up all of their propellants, leaving none in reserve for a powered first stage landing.

The flight plan called for two firings of the upper stage engine before Hera’s release to fly on its own one hour and 16 minutes after liftoff.

To reach Didymos and Dimorphos, Hera will have to execute a deep space thruster firing in November to set up a gravity-assist flyby of Mars in March, sailing within about 3,700 miles of the red planet. Along the way, the spacecraft will pass within 620 miles of the small martian moon Deimos.

“By swinging through the gravitational field of Mars in its direction of movement, the spacecraft gains added velocity for its onward journey,” Michael Kueppers, ESA’s project scientist, said on the agency’s website.

“This close encounter is not part of Hera’s core mission, but we will have several of our science instruments activated anyway. It gives us another chance to calibrate our instruments and potentially to make some scientific discoveries.”

After another deep space maneuver in February 2026, Hera will finally be on course to slip into orbit around Didymos the following October. The mission is expected to last about six months.

Stormy weather has threatened to delay the launch of Europe’s Hera spacecraft, which is scheduled to blast off on Monday, SpaceX has said.
The probe will head off on a mission to inspect the damage a NASA spacecraft did to an asteroid when it smashed into it in 2022 during the first test of Earth’s planetary defences.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) deliberately crashed into the pyramid-sized asteroid Dimorphos roughly 11 million kilometres (6.8 million miles) from Earth.
The fridge-sized spacecraft successfully knocked the asteroid well off course, demonstrating that humanity may no longer be powerless against potentially planet-killing asteroids that could head our way in the future.
But much about the impact remains unknown, including how much damage was done and exactly what the asteroid was like before it was hit.
So the European Space Agency (ESA) says it is sending Hera to the asteroid to conduct a “crime scene investigation” in the hopes of learning how Earth can best fend off future asteroids.
The spacecraft is scheduled to blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida at 10:52 am local time (1452 GMT) on Monday.
However thunderstorms have been forecasted in the launch area. SpaceX said on X on Sunday that the weather is currently only 15 percent favourable for a launch.
If a delay is required, a back-up launch is planned for Tuesday 10:46 am local time, SpaceX said.
The launch window for the mission will remain open until October 27.
– Green light after ‘mishap’ –
The launch had also faced a potential delay due to an anomaly involving a Falcon 9 rocket during the launch of SpaceX’s Crew-9 astronaut mission late last month.
But on Sunday, the US Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light.
“The absence of a second stage re-entry for this mission adequately mitigates the primary risk to the public in the event of a reoccurrence of the mishap experienced with the Crew-9 mission,” it said in a statement.
The launch window for the mission will remain open until October 27.
Once launched, Hera is planned to fly past Mars next year and then arrive near Dimorphos in December 2026 to begin its six-month investigation.
Dimorphos, which is actually a moonlet orbiting its big brother Didymos, never posed a threat to Earth.
After DART’s impact, Dimorphos shed material to the point where its orbit around Didymos was shortened by 33 minutes — proof that it was successfully deflected.
Analysis of the DART mission has suggested that rather than being a single hard rock, Dimorphos was more a loose pile of rubble held together by gravity.
“The consequence of this is that, instead of making a crater” on Dimorphos, DART may have “completely deformed” the asteroid, the Hera mission’s principal investigator Patrick Michel told a press conference.
But there are other possibilities, he said, adding that the behaviour of these low-gravity objects is little understood and “defies intuition”.
The 363-million-euro ($400 million) mission will be equipped with 12 scientific instruments and two nanosatellites.

An independent hacker has publicly revealed a second breach of NASA‘s systems, uncovering significant security vulnerabilities. The hacker, who shared the news on X, claimed to have reported the issues directly to NASA, allowing the agency time to address these security concerns.

NASA acknowledges hacker’s contributions with appreciation letter after vulnerability report

He stated, “I hacked @NASA (again) and reported some vulnerabilities to them.Just today, I received this appreciation letter from them after they patched the loopholes!”

In response, NASA acknowledged the vulnerabilities and sent an appreciation letter to the hacker. Signed by Mark Witt, NASA’s Chief Information Officer, the letter commended the hacker for identifying critical vulnerabilities and assisting in the protection of NASA’s systems. The agency expressed gratitude for the hacker’s role in maintaining the “integrity and availability” of its information infrastructure.
The letter stated, “On behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and NASA’s Vulnerability Disclosure Policy (VDP), we want to recognize your efforts as an independent security researcher in identifying the vulnerability you reported and for responsibly following our VDP guidelines.”

Community responds with praise and humour for hacker’s achievement

Many users on X praised the hacker’s achievement, with one remarking, “That’s worth at least as much as a degree LOL,” and another saying, “Good work, mate.” One user commented, “Very nice, congratulations! Also very honest to report it to them,” while another noted, “Good on NASA for rewarding security researchers instead of punishing them with legal action—it’s really in their best interest.”
Some users also shared lighthearted comments, with one joking, “They didn’t even give you a ‘I hacked NASA and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt’ shirt?” and another saying, “So hacking NASA is not just a meme haha, great job!”

SpaceX mission update

In other news, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule has successfully docked with the ISS and is set to return stranded NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore to Earth in February 2025.
Also Read | Earth has two moons now, but is the ‘second moon’ visible from India?

Nasa is set to launch the SpaceX Crew-9 mission on Saturday, which will bring astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore back to Earth after their extended stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS) since June. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch at 1:17 pm EDT (10:47 pm IST) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Live coverage of the launch will begin at 9:00 am EDT (6:30 pm IST) on Nasa’‘s official website, NASA+, and YouTube.The Crew-9 mission will be the first crewed launch from Space Launch Complex-40.
The spacecraft is set to dock with the ISS around 5:30 pm EDT (3:00 am IST) on Monday.
The Crew-9 mission is part of Nasa’s Commercial Crew Program. It includes Nasa astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Originally scheduled for September 26, the launch was delayed due to Hurricane Helene hitting Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Nasa posted on X that managers from Nasa and SpaceX were discussing the planned September 28 launch of the Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station, along with a weather update provided by Space Launch Delta 45.

In another post on X, Nasa mentioned a live panel on the International Space Station with Nasa leaders, where they would answer questions from digital creators attending the Crew-9 Nasa Social event, as well as questions submitted online using the hashtag #AskNASA.

The mission aims to transport Hague and Gorbunov to the ISS for a five-month stay and ensure the safe return of Williams and Wilmore. Hague and Gorbunov will stay on the ISS until February, coinciding with the next crew rotation. Astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson were also initially part of the Crew-9 mission but were removed to make room for the returning astronauts.
Williams and Wilmore traveled to the ISS in June on Boeing’s Starliner capsule for an eight-day mission. However, their stay was extended due to issues with the Starliner’s thrusters. Nasa then return the Starliner uncrewed on September 7 for further assessment.

In another SpaceX milestone, billionaire Jared Isaacman and company crew trainer Sarah Gillis took turns floating just outside their Crew Dragon capsule early Thursday in the first privately-financed spacewalk in the history of space exploration.

As he took in his first unobstructed look at the Earth 458 miles below, Isaacman marveled at the serene, boundary-free view, saying “back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world.”

With Polaris Dawn crewmates Anna Menon and Scott Poteet monitoring safety tethers and umbilicals inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon, airless with its hatch open, Isaacman ventured into open space around 6:51 a.m. EDT, using a scaffold-like “Skywalker” framework extending from the hatch for stability.

While his feet were just outside the hatch, he did not “free float” away from the Crew Dragon. The Space-X designed pressure suits were not equipped with their own oxygen supply or other life support equipment and relied instead on the 12-foot-long umbilicals to deliver air, power and communications.

As Isaacman and then Gillis floated one at a time just outside the hatch, they tested the comfort and mobility of their pressurized extra-vehicular activity, or EVA, suits, moving their arms, hands and legs through a series of positions to find out how much effort is required to carry out basic tasks. 

“We’re going to make use of various mobility aids the SpaceX team has engineered, and it’ll look like we’re doing a little bit of a dance,” Isaacman said before launch. “The idea is to learn as much as we possibly can about this suit and get it back to the engineers to inform future suit design evolutions.”

Cameras mounted inside and outside the Crew Dragon, along with others attached to the spacewalkers’ helmets, provided wide-angle views of space and the Earth below as the ship sailed through an elliptical orbit with a low point of 121 miles and a high point of 458 miles — 200 miles higher than the International Space Station.

“It’s gorgeous,” Isaacman said, taking a moment to take in the view after carrying out his portion of the mobility tests.

The walk was declared finished at 7:58 a.m. EDT. SpaceX said everyone reported feeling “healthy” after the walk was completed. 

The goal of the one-hour 46-minute spacewalk was to help company engineers perfect low-cost, easy-to-manufacture spacesuits for use by future commercial astronauts flying to the moon or Mars aboard SpaceX Super Heavy-Starship rockets.

“I think that this journey of creating affordable EVA suits that can be scaled up into mass production is a very worthwhile one,” said Isaacman, who chartered SpaceX’s first fully commercial flight to orbit in 2021. “There’s going to be an armada of Starships arriving on Mars at some point in the future, and those people are going to have to be able to get out of it and walk around and do important things.”

Isaacman, Poteet, Menon and Gillis blasted off Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The crew accomplished the first major goal of the flight right off the bat, climbing to an altitude of 870 miles — higher than any piloted spacecraft since the Apollo moon program 60 years ago.

The high point, or apogee, of the orbit then was lowered to 458 miles for the spacewalk and the remainder of the five-day mission.

To prevent decompression sickness, also known as the bends, during the crew’s transition from sea-level pressure to the reduced 5 psi pressure in their spacesuits and back, flight controllers began a 45-hour process shortly after launch to boost oxygen levels in the cabin while slowly decreasing air pressure to help remove nitrogen from the crew’s bloodstreams.

“We don’t anticipate experiencing (the bends), because a ton of robust preparation has gone into developing this pre-breathe protocol, significantly reducing that risk,” said Menon, a former biomedical flight controller for NASA. “But we’re prepared if we need it.”

It didn’t appear any such steps were needed.

The Crew Dragon does not have an airlock and its life support system was not designed to support spacewalks. Required modifications included “adding a lot more oxygen to the spacecraft so that we can feed oxygen to four suits through umbilicals for the full duration of the spacewalk,” Gillis said.

“There have been upgrades and additions to the environmental sensing suite in the spacecraft to make sure we have really good insight, both before, during and after exposure to vacuum. And … an entirely new system, a nitrogen repress system” to boost the cabin back up to normal pressure after the spacewalk.

Along with the Skywalker scaffold, which extends just beyond the forward hatch, a motor drive system was added to assist with hatch opening and closing and upgraded seals were put in place to ensure an airtight fit.

NASA astronaut Ed White carried out the first U.S. spacewalk on June 3, 1965, floating free of his Gemini 4 capsule at the end of a long tether. Since then, NASA astronauts, Russian cosmonauts, Chinese taikonauts and astronauts from space station partner nations have carried out more than 470 government-sponsored spacewalks.

Isaacman said iconic photos of White floating outside his Gemini capsule against the backdrop of Earth and space were inspirational, but he and Gillis ruled out floating free of the Crew Dragon. And that was by design.

“We’re not going to be doing the Ed White float,” Isaacman told CBS News before launch. “That might look cool, but it doesn’t really help SpaceX learn a lot about the performance (of the spacesuit). It’s not very useful or helpful for figuring out how to be able to to work in a suit.”

To that end, he and Gillis will work through a “matrix” of planned motions to get a feel for how the suit’s multiple joints move while pressurized, to test the performance of an innovative heads-up display in the helmet, better understand how the air-cooled suits deal with the extreme temperatures of space and a variety of other factors.

The suit “includes all sorts of technology, including a heads-up display, a helmet camera, an entirely new architecture for joint mobility,” Gillis said. “There’s thermal insulation throughout the suit, including a copper and indium tin oxide visor that both provides thermal protection and solar protection.”

In addition, she said, “there’s all sorts of redundancy, both in the oxygen supply feed to the suit, as well as all of the valves, all of the seals across the suit. It’s an incredible suit.”

The heads-up display, which will project critical data on the lower left side of the helmet visor, is a feature NASA’s decades old space station suits do not have.

“During the EVA, we’ll have insight into our suit, pressure, temperature, relative humidity and then also an understanding of how much oxygen we’ve used throughout the EVA. So some key pieces of telemetry right there. And it’s it’s really cool (that) with any lighting you can still see it.”

The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three planned by Isaacman in cooperation with Elon Musk. The second flight will be another Crew Dragon mission while the third will be the first piloted flight of SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket, now under development in Texas.

It’s not known how much Isaacman is paying for the flights or how much SpaceX funded on its own. Asked if he could share any details, the entrepreneur, jet pilot and adventurer said “not a chance.”

The mission, SpaceX’s fifth commercial Crew Dragon flight to orbit and its 14th including NASA flights, is expected to last five days, ending with splashdown off the coast of Florida.

Elon Musk-led SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn spacecraft on Tuesday launched the first-ever crew for ‘all-civilian’ spacewalk. The first commercial spaceflight mission with a spacewalk carries billionaire Jared Isaacman, along with three others, for the all-civilian spacewalk. It lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket today at after 5:23 a.m. EDT (2:54 PM IST) from historic Launch Complex-39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

“Liftoff of Polaris Dawn!” SpaceX said in a post on X. The mission has been delayed since August, first over a helium leak and then weather played spoilsport. Polaris Programme was launched by billionaire Jared Isaacman — the commander of the first “all-civilian” space mission Inspiration4, launched in 2021. Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned missions under the programme.

Watch Launch Video

Watch live as Falcon 9 launches the @PolarisProgram’s Polaris Dawn crew on a multi-day mission orbiting Earth https://t.co/u1KqQx5AFr
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 10, 2024

Along with Isaacman, the mission launched pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, mission specialist Sarah Gillis, and medical officer Anna Menon. The mission will be free-flying and will go to a “very high altitude that humans haven’t gone to in 50-plus years,” Isaacman said earlier. Only Apollo was higher.

During the mission, the teams will conduct research to better understand the effects of spaceflight and space radiation on human health. “While on-orbit, the Polaris Dawn crew will conduct 36 research and science experiments from 31 partner institutions to expand our knowledge of humans adapting, living, and working in space,” Polaris Dawn said in a post on X.

The crew will also “be the first crew to test Starlink laser-based communications in space”. They will provide valuable data for future space communications systems necessary for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

After an exhaustive review of suspect transistors in NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, NASA managers have cleared the probe for launch next month as planned on a $5.2 billion mission to find out if a suspected sub-surface ocean on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is a habitable environment.

The transistor issue cropped up in May, raising fears the scope of the Clipper’s mission might have to be reduced or the flight delayed for costly repairs.

But the review showed the transistors in question will, in effect, heal themselves during the 20 days between the high radiation doses the probe will receive during each of 49 close flybys of Europa, all of them deep in Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field and radiation environment.

In addition, onboard heaters can be used as needed to raise the temperature of affected transistors, improving the recovery process.

“After extensive testing and analysis of the transistors, the Europa Clipper project and I personally have high confidence we can complete the original mission for exploring Europa as planned,” said Jordan Evans, Europa Clipper project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The solar-powered Europa Clipper, one of NASA’s most ambitious planetary probes, is a “flagship” mission designed to make multiple close flybys of Europa to learn whether a subsurface salt water ocean beneath the frozen world’s icy crust could host a habitable environment.

If habitability can be confirmed, “just think of what that means, that there are two places in one solar system that have all the ingredients for life that are habitable right now at the same time,” said Curt Niebur, Europa Clipper program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

“Think of what that means when you extend that result to the billions and billions of other solar systems in this galaxy. Setting aside the ‘is there life?’ question on Europa, just the habitability question in and of itself opens up a huge new paradigm for searching for life in the galaxy.”

Discovered in 1610 by Galileo, Europa has been studied by NASA’s Voyager probes and, much more extensively, by the agency’s aptly-named Galileo orbiter in the 1990s, which made a dozen close flybys.

The spacecraft discovered that Jupiter’s magnetic field was disrupted around Europa, implying an electrically conductive fluid deep within the moon. Given Europa’s frozen crust, the most likely explanation is a sub-surface salt water ocean, kept warm by tidal flexing, the repetitive squeezing by Jupiter’s enormous gravity as the moon swings through its orbit.

The Europa Clipper is not designed to search for signs of life on or below Europa’s crust. But confirming the presence of a hidden sea and determining its habitability would be a major step forward in the search for places in the solar system and beyond where life, as currently defined, could exist.

“This is an epic mission,” Niebur said. “It’s a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today, right now,”

“A chance to do the first exploration of this new kind of world that we’ve discovered very recently called an ocean world, that is just totally immersed and covered in a liquid water ocean, completely unlike anything we’ve seen before. That’s what Europa Clipper and her team are going to unveil for us.”

Scheduled for launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 10 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the spacecraft will first fly past Mars in February, using the red planet’s gravity to send it toward another velocity-boosting flyby of Earth in December 2026.

Only then will the Europa Clipper be traveling fast enough to head out into deep space on a trajectory to Jupiter. Even so, the probe won’t reach its target until April 2030, using its thrusters to brake into an initial orbit around the giant planet.

Five months later, the first in a series of close flybys of several moons will be needed to set up the first close encounter with Europa in the spring of 2031. During two science campaigns running through 2034, at least 49 close flybys of Europa are planned, including passes as low as 16 miles above the moon’s frozen surface.

The mission was progressing toward launch when engineers were alerted in May to a potentially serious problem with transistors used throughout the spacecraft. Similar components were found to fail at lower radiation doses than expected.

The radiation environment around Jupiter is powered by the planet’s titanic magnetic field, which traps and accelerates electrically charged particles from the solar wind and the volcanic moon Io. The radiation environment in the vicinity of Europa would kill an unprotected astronaut in a matter of hours.

As a result, Europa’s flight computer and other key components are protected in a radiation-resistant “vault.” Radiation “hardened” components are used throughout the spacecraft. But test data from the manufacturer showed similar components were failing at lower radiation levels than the Europa Clipper will experience.

But after months of testing, engineers concluded the spacecraft can complete its mission with no major modifications.

“We completed extensive testing to validate the transistors on the spacecraft,” Evans said. “We ran tests 24 hours a day over the last four months at multiple locations. We simulated flight-like conditions to illuminate any issues that the transistors might have over our four-year science mission across the variety of applications we have on the spacecraft.

“We put these representative transistors into these environments, irradiated entire circuits to see how the system behaves. … We replicated that transistor self-healing, or annealing as it’s called, that occurs by heating them to room temperature while they, essentially, (are out of) that intense radiation environment as we go around each orbit.”

Based on the results, he said, “we’re ready for our final launch preparations and reviews. We are ready for Europa.”