Heliospace has announced a significant milestone with the successful in-flight operation of its radar antennas aboard the NASA Europa Clipper spacecraft during a high-profile Mars flyby conducted on March 1, 2025. Heliospace designed, assembled, tested, and delivered these antennas under contract with Caltech as part of the Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface (REASON) instrument onboard Europa Clipper.

Once at Europa, the REASON instrument will use multiple radar frequencies to see through the moon’s icy shell, where it may detect liquid water, including a subsurface ocean. En route to Europa, the mission uses several flybys around the Earth and Mars as “gravity assists” to bend the spacecraft's trajectory as part of its overall course to Jupiter. During a flyby of Mars on March 1 of 2025, the REASON radar was measured in its ability to explore the Martian subsurface using the same radio waves it will employ at Europa. According to NASA and the REASON science team, the instrument performed just as expected, thus validating the design and performance of the Heliospace-built deployable antennas, as well as the rest of the REASON instrument.

Heliospace built two different types of deployable radar antennas for the Europa Clipper mission: two High Frequency (HF) antennas, which deploy to over 55 feet in length, and four smaller Very High Frequency (VHF) antennas, which deploy to approximately 9 feet in length. The Heliospace radar antennas are an extremely compact design accommodated on the edges of the Europa Clipper spacecraft solar arrays, providing a unique, low mass solution.

Heliospace co-founder and CEO Greg Delory stated, “This was a crucial operation, both for our antennas and the REASON instrument. This marks a transformational moment for Heliospace. Our antennas not only deployed and functioned as designed and is now poised to make amazing discoveries at Europa. This validation opens the door for further mission-critical opportunities and deepens our strategic alignment with NASA. It’s extremely gratifying for us at Heliospace that our company helped make this happen.”

Under principal investigator Dr. Donald Blankenship of the University of Texas, Austin, REASON is a dual-frequency ice-penetrating radar instrument designed to characterize and sound Europa's icy crust from the near-surface to the ocean, revealing the hidden structure of Europa's ice shell and potential water within. The Europa Clipper program is managed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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