I'm John Bachelor with Bob Zimmerman behind the black Europa Clipper, the coolest name in

probes, but is there news Bob?

Good evening. Yes, I'm not sure if it's good. But is there news Bob good evening?

Yes, and I'm not sure if it's good news or bad, but it's news.

NASA has now confirmed that it is decided to go ahead with the October 10th launch of this 5 billion-plus Europa clipping mission to Jupiter.

It's going to go to Jupiter-Oper and it's focused on doing lots of flybys of the Jupiter

Moon Europa to study it. Now that's the good news they're going to launch.

The bad news is that they discovered only recently that transistors that were installed in the spacecraft in its electronic system

were not properly hardened for the high radiation environment of Jupiter

and will likely fail once they get to Jupiter.

NASA has done analysis and they think that those transistors

will last long enough to them to get the baseline

initial mission completed.

And so they've decided to go ahead

rather than have several years delay

and a lot of extra money to take the spacecraft

apart and replace those transistors.

So the good news is that they're going to launch,

the bad news is that we might not get that many results

from this $5 billion probe.

It might get some results, but when it arrives in Jupiter in 2030 and fails prematurely,

we must remember this is a decision that NASA made now.

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