Mars says hello as NASA's Europa Clipper warms up radar

NASA's Europa Clipper probe checked out its radar as the spacecraft hurtled past Mars on the way to Jupiter's moon Europa.

The Mars flyby in March was primarily to use the planet's gravitational pull to tweak the Europa Clipper's trajectory. However, boffins were able to use the proximity of the planet to calibrate the spacecraft's infrared camera and test its radar ahead of its arrival at Europa in 2030, NASA has confirmed.

Engineers were unable to test the flight version of the radar instrument on Earth. Engineering models were tested outside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, but the flight hardware needed to be kept sterile so could only be tested in a clean room.

NASA has access to some enormous clean rooms, and the spacecraft was assembled and tested in the giant High Bay 1 clean room at JPL. However, there wasn ...