Take a closer look at the complex choreography involved in building NASA's Europa Clipper as the mission to explore Jupiter's moon Europa approaches its 2024 launch date.

The hardware that makes up NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft is rapidly taking shape, as engineering components and instruments are prepared for delivery to the main clean room at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. In workshops and labs across the country and in Europe, teams are crafting the complex pieces that make up the whole as mission leaders direct the elaborate choreography of building a flagship mission.

The massive 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) propulsion module recently moved from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, where engineers will install electronics, radios, antennas, and cabling. The spacecraft's thick aluminum vault, which will protect Europa Clipper's electronics from Jupiter's intense radiation, is nearing completion at JPL. The building and testing of the science instruments at universities and partner institutions across the country continue as well.

A new technique for processing lunar radar data has allowed scientists to see what lies beneath the surface of the moon in the clearest ever detail.

In a study led by the University of Aberdeen, a team of researchers discovered multiple layers of soil that lie directly beneath an area on the far side of the moon's surface, overturning an existing theory of a single deep layer in the same area.

The area studied was the landing site of the Chang'E-4 spacecraft mission—the first to the far side of the moon.

Analysis of radar data captured by the mission's rover, Yutu-2, had suggested the existence of a single soil layer in the moon's regolith (subsurface). However, the data did not indicate the existence of different layers of soil, which were transparent to electromagnetic waves due to the smooth boundaries between them.

By developing a new method of processing the data captured by Yutu-2, which uses the shape of radar signatures of buried rocks and boulders to infer the properties of surrounding lunar soil and detect previously unseen layers with smooth boundaries, scientists were able to detect four distinct layers of soil, stacked to a depth of 12 meters.