Europa Clipper Thermal System Performance

The Europa Clipper Mission launched on October 14, 2024 and begun its 5.5 year cruise towards Jupiter. Clipper will be the first flight system to execute dedicated science investigations of the Jovian moon Europa. Through its mission, Clipper will be exposed to a wide range of thermal environments, including ~0.82AU perihelion, 5.6AU maximum sun range, and a 9.2-hour Jupiter Eclipse. Additionally, due to the large sun range during its science campaign and its use of Solar Arrays as the power source, the thermal design is intended to be power efficient. Before Launch, the Clipper spacecraft went over a thorough environmental test campaign including System TVAC (STV) for thermal system verification and validation. While the test was design to be as flight-like as possible, certain test constraints (facility size, hardware availability, etc.), led to some difference from the flight configuration. This paper provides a summary of the STV campaign, the thermal model correlation effort, pre-flight expected performance of the thermal subsystem, and comparison to early performance in flight.