Overview

• Europa Clipper activated its REASON radar for 40 minutes during a March 2025 Mars flyby, scanning subsurface layers and gathering 60 gigabytes of raw data.
• The Mars pass provided a gravity assist that refined the spacecraft’s trajectory toward Jupiter’s moon Europa.
• Scientists will use the radar measurements to calibrate data-processing methods and benchmark in-space performance against existing models.
• The spacecraft is currently about 450 million kilometers from Earth and continues its 2.9 billion-kilometer journey to Europa.
• A planned Earth gravity assist in 2026 will further adjust its path before a series of Europa flybys to probe the moon’s ice shell for a hidden ocean.