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Associate Professor Sascha Kempf is the principal investigator on the Europa Clipper’s SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA). Scientists have long had their eyes on Europa as an important target in the search for life beyond Earth. This ice-covered sphere is slightly smaller than Earth’s own moon, and only the fourth-largest of Jupiter’s moons. Underneath its miles-thick layer of ice, researchers suspect Europa could hold more than twice the saltwater of all of Earth’s oceans combined—an ocean that might also carry ingredients necessary to sustain living organisms, including organic molecules like amino acids. “There’s, essentially, a thin sphere of particles around the moon,” says Scott Tucker, the SUDA project manager at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). “It’s like Pigpen in the Peanuts comics with his cloud of dust.”��

SUDA will use its wide mouth to capture those particles. These tiny grains will be moving at relative speeds of more than 10,000 miles per hour—so fast that when they hit the target that sits at the back of the instrument, they will vaporize on impact. SUDA collects the ions that escape from those collisions and measures them to determine exactly what the particles were made of. In order to ensure the particles are free from earthbound contaminants, SUDA is constructed in a clean room at LASP. “We have to be able to demonstrate that the material we detect is from Europa and not from us,” Kempf says.