- 1Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD 20723, United States of America (adrienn.luspay-kuti@jhuapl.edu)
- 2Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, La Cañada Flintridge, CA 91011, United States of America
- 3Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States of America
- 4University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States of America
- 5University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States of America
- 6University or Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, United States of America
- 7NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States of America
Europa Clipper launched on October 14, 2024 and is now en route to Europa to study this icy moon with a subsurface ocean. Characterizing Europa’s subsurface ocean is critical to assess its habitability – the primary goal of the Europa Clipper mission. The Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding, or PIMS, consists of 4 Faraday cups (Ram, Zenith, Anti-ram, Nadir) on 2 sensors (PIMS Upper and PIMS Lower) located on opposite sides of Europa Clipper. PIMS measures the current induced by plasma particles with sufficient E/q to make it through a modulated grid placed at AC high voltage (HV). The HV waveform applied to the modulator grid consists of a DC level and a sine wave with a pre-set amplitude; thus, the particles that can pass through the grid produce an AC current. PIMS will characterize the plasma in Europa’s magnetic environments, which will allow for the subtraction of the plasma contribution from the magnetic induction signal measured by the Europa Clipper Magnetometer (ECM). Subtracting the plasma contributions from the induced field measurements will provide a more accurate derivation of the ocean depth and conductivity, and ice shell thickness.
PIMS was powered on for the first time since Europa Clipper’s launch in December 2024. While the goal of this checkout was to assess PIMS’s post-launch health, a welcome surprise was the detection of a coronal mass ejection (CME) by the Zenith cup on PIMS Upper. This fortuitous detection was made during only a ~1-hour period that PIMS was running in science mode. Several other observatories also observed this CME, including MMS and the L1 constellation at Earth, and STEREO-A elsewhere at 1 AU. These observations along with PIMS on Europa Clipper allow for some rare multipoint analysis of the size, shape, and propagation of this CME.
The solar cycle is currently at maximum with an increased number of solar events driving space weather effects in geospace around Earth and beyond. These “first light” measurements clearly demonstrate the importance of PIMS, and Europa Clipper, as a working asset for understanding space weather in the Earth-Mars region – a region of space otherwise lacking instrumentation for these measurements. CMEs are the biggest space weather hazards for astronauts, which makes turning PIMS and ECM on and having them collecting data during Europa Clipper’s interplanetary cruise phase all the more important.
How to cite: Luspay-Kuti, A., Turner, D., McNutt, R., Crew, A., Smith, H. T., Nordheim, T., Waller, D., Cochrane, C., Stevens, M., Kivelson, M., Jia, X., Paty, C., Khurana, K., Rymer, A., Slavin, J., Korth, H., and Mandt, K.: The Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding (PIMS) on Europa Clipper: some explosive “first light” observations, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-13104, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-13104, 2025.
