Tyler Yuen Explores Europa (From a Distance)
As part of Tyler Yuen’s Europa Clipper internship program, he visted NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena with his fellow interns. Photo courtesy of Tyler Yuen.
When NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft launched on October 14, it began its long journey to Europa, one of Jupiter’s icy moons. During its travels, it will traverse 1.8 billion miles as part of the first NASA mission dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond Earth.
As you may imagine, a mission of this size is the work of thousands of people – and one of those people is Tyler Yuen, ’26 Aerospace Engineering, who was selected as one of 40 undergraduate students for the first year of its Europa Inspiring Clipper: Opportunities for Next-generation Scientists (ICONS) internship program, which supported the Clipper mission.
Yuen’s internship began this May and ended in September. He worked at UC Santa Cruz with Benjamin Idini, a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics, helping develop simulations to model tidal heating theory on Europa.
Yuen was “a little stunned” to be selected — he’d worked on NASA-related programs in the past, including a crowdsourcing initiative connected with Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the NASA L-SPACE program, a free online summer academy that teaches students about the mission life cycle – but this opportunity was a different level entirely.
“I was applying to tons of internships and programs with just a slim chance of getting in,” he remembers. “It was really a shock to me that I’d be able to get this opportunity.”
Moving with the tides
Europa has a thick shell of ice with a salt ocean underneath. As Yuen explains, “The tidal motion of the ocean under Europa causes thermal activity through friction with the salt molecules rubbing against each other, and large waves in the ocean breaking into smaller waves. That leads to the creation of landforms.”
Yuen’s project helped explore tidal heating and what it can create— research that has implications for Earth as well. “Exploring Europa also gives us insight as to how our Earth and a lot of the other planets in the solar system were formed,” he says. “That’s one of the broader missions NASA has had over the past few decades: exploring the origins of the universe by going to these other bodies.”
Over the summer he, Idini and a fellow intern worked on these models using the coding language Python and UC Santa Cruz’s supercomputer, which enabled them to do much faster calculations. It was all new territory for Yuen, who took a class to learn Python. His mentor Idini developed simulations for Europa’s tidal heating and then Yuen was “modifying it and adding more code optimization to implement it for Europa’s case,” as well as writing scripts to run the simulation through the supercomputing cluster.
Yuen also traveled in July to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, where he met other Europa Clipper interns, as well as NASA staffers and scientists, and participated in professional development discussions.Yuen found this experience dizzying – they were only there for about 48 hours total — but also very valuable.
“We were able to speak to [NASA] mentors and learn their career pathways and how they ended up working at these astrophysics institutions,” he explains. They also spoke to Robert Pappalardo, the project scientist for the Clipper mission, who Yuen calls “a super cool guy.”
On their last night at JPL, the interns also got the chance to tour Mount Wilson Observatory and view its refractor. “We were up at the observatory until probably 3 a.m.,” Yuen says. “Our tour guide took us to the other observing areas and we were able to talk to some of the scientists actually doing the research up there. It was a really, really fun experience.”
At the end of the internship, each Clipper intern also delivered a ten-minute virtual presentation on their project to the group.
A new perspective
Yuen is still largely interested in a career in engineering, even after this intense astrophysics experience, but he’s incredibly grateful for all the new skills he’s learned and people he’s met. He loved his time at UC Santa Cruz interacting with the astrophysics students as well as his mentor – he remembers weekly bonfires, and the chance to join their Lamat Initiative, which supported underrepresented communities in astrophysics.
And even though the internship ended, the connections remain. Idini told Yuen he’s welcome to come back next summer to continue their research, and somewhere down the line his name may be included in a published paper (although with Clipper scheduled to reach Europa in 2030, it may be a while).
Yuen is glad to see the engineering world from another side. “When it comes to developing spacecraft instruments and spacecraft itself, which is something that I’m really interested in, it’s really important to actually understand the science that’s going behind why we’re sending these spacecraft out there,” he says. “If you really understand astrophysics research, you’re able to better optimize the instruments and the hardware and everything that goes into engineering the spacecraft itself.”
“I would definitely tell other students to have an open mind. They may have tunnel vision, instead of trying different fields and different aspects of their major. Don’t force yourself down a certain pathway; try to expand your horizons.”
And he knows about expansive horizons: his own expanded to an icy moon 1.8 billion miles away.
“I never thought that I’d be able to have this opportunity,” he says. “Working on planetary science missions puts everything in perspective. We’re so small in comparison to everything else. It’s inspiring.”
