This is a CBS Island in the world.

Behind the Black Bob Zimmerman is here and we're headed to Europa, maybe.

Bob, the Europa Clipper, I've always loved the name, the whole idea is to look into an ocean and see if something's moving.

What is its status?

It's a bad situation right now, John. I've reported on this earlier.

And building its multi-billion dollar Europa Clipper Jupiter orbiter, they're supposed to take good looks at

Europe and look for maybe an underground ocean. It's a multi billion dollar mission.

It's already used behind schedule because it was originally being forced to launch on SLS. In building it and

only a few weeks from launch, NASA discovered that some of the transistors built into the spacecraft were not properly

hardened for the radiation of space. Now Jupiter has a very high

radiation environment so they certainly had a real problem if they launch Europe a clipper with these

non-hardened transistors it probably will not last very long in Jupiter orbit.

But if they stop to take the spacecraft apart and put new transistors in,

they will not be ready for their October 10th launch,

and we're looking because of orbital mechanics and a multi-year delay.

And NASA's been trying to decide what to do.

It now looks like they're leaning to launching the thing because it'll be less

embarrassing to them to have to they think they can get a minimum amount of data from

it so the large is multi-billion dollar mission no one will complain they'll

get it into orbit no one will complain they'll get a little bit of data from it and people will complain a little bit but it won't be such bad press

If they delay it now they face bigger press so that's what they're planning on doing

It's really not good because it means the mission is probably not

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