Efforts Toward Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Europa Clipper Mission

The Europa Clipper is a NASA flagship-class strategic mission with plans to place a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter and perform several dozen close flybys of Europa with the goal of investigating the satellite’s habitability. A diversity of scientific expertise, experiences, and perspectives is critical to obtaining the best science on a large project such as Europa Clipper. We will discuss the composition of the Europa Clipper science team and efforts by the team toward improving equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). These efforts include: deliberate consideration of team structure and interactions to promote equity and inclusion, promoting bystander training of team members, and clear communication of a code of conduct. The Europa Clipper science team strives for ways to produce a more level playing field and increased participation, in order to improve the working environment and maximize the mission’s overall science return. Because scientific spaces have been designed by and for members of select demographic groups, inclusivity is an aspirational goal, and we need to continually strive to include and listen to voices from members of traditionally underrepresented groups. Some specific suggested actions are discussed in Rathbun et al. (2020, LPSC, 51), and the Europa Clipper science team is working toward these goals. We hope that other missions can learn from the ongoing Europa Clipper experience, while our mission team also learns from others. Towards this end, regular communications are encouraged among science team members of different missions on ongoing EDI efforts.

This work was supported by NASA through the Europa Clipper Project.