Fire and Ice: Astrogeology involved in October spacecraft launches of Hera and Europa Clipper
Two important missions launched in October and U.S. Geological Survey is here to give you a ride-along! ESA’s (European Space Agency) Hera will investigate the damage to Dimorphos, a small body impacted by a NASA spacecraft to test Planetary Defense mitigation strategies. NASA’s Europa Clipper will explore Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, through a series of flybys.
Astrogeology scientists involved in these missions have given us a peek into planning and their excitement for the upcoming launches.
Through the Fire
In 2022, the NASA-led Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission demonstrated that humanity could deflect an asteroid by hitting it with a spacecraft. The European Space Agency-led Hera mission launched October 7, will map out the damage caused by DART. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is just one of the many international partners that support the Hera mission and planetary defense efforts.
USGS Research Space Scientist Tim Titus was selected by NASA as a Hera participating scientist to use observations from the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA)-built Thermal Infrared Imager (TIRI) to assist in the characterization of the physical properties of the asteroids' surfaces. “Understanding the surface properties are just some of the considerations needed to design future asteroid deflection missions,” Dr. Titus explains.
Freeze Frame
NASA’s Europa Clipper is a spacecraft that launched October 14, 2024, which will conduct a series of flybys of Europa while in orbit of Jupiter. Astrogeology has been involved with the spacecraft in a variety of ways, but most notably through work on the Europa Imaging System (EIS) camera and through continued mapping support. Our scientific interests on Europa at Astrogeology are mainly in the geology and the implications of EIS observations for geodesy and the interior (which has a liquid water ocean under an ice crust of – to date – unknown thickness), in addition to mapping and surface observations. Scientist Emeritus Randolph (Randy) Kirk and Research Space Scientist Michael (Mike) Bland share their excitement for this mission below!
Randy Kirk is a Co-Investigator on the EIS camera on Europa Clipper, and Mike Bland has been working with the Europa Clipper team. The launch is a milestone for Astrogeology because once Europa Clipper is in its Cruise phase, Randy will become a Co-I Emeritus and Mike will be added as Co-I and take over as project lead within Astrogeology.
This is a return to his beginnings and a fitting career end for Randy: “I did my thesis partly on the evolution of Ganymede and did a lot of Titan work on NASA’s Cassini mission, so becoming Emeritus on a mission launching to an icy moon is agreeable symmetry.” In the year leading up to launch, Mike and Randy have been involved in the mission-wide reviews of the importance and best use of the many Europa flybys that are planned. Their particular focus has been on geodesy (global shape, rotation parameters, and integration of data into a Europa-wide coordinate system) and the creation of image mosaics and local topographic models.
Astrogeology’s role in EIS combines technical and scientific contributions. Randy and Mike have been involved in geometric calibration of the cameras, planning requirements and strategies for making observations (especially stereo), and developing software and procedures that will be used for mapping Europa. They and the Astrogeology software developers have developed sensor models in the Integrated Software for Imagers and Spectrometers, and other software, for processing the images and are working on simulating stereo images and processing them into topographic models in the Ames Stereo Pipeline and SOCET GXP.
The group at the University of Arizona will build processing pipelines based on these tools, and the actual processing will be done at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Maryland. As in past missions, Astro will undoubtedly be involved in developing the best procedures for using the software and troubleshooting the difficult cases of stereo processing, with partners in many sectors.
We wish these teams well and hope for clear skies and a steady coast on the way to Dimorphos and Europa!
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