Where is Europa Clipper right now?
Europa Clipper is currently about 91,897,509 kilometres from Earth, roughly 0.61 astronomical units, or 5.1 light-minutes away, and 1.09 astronomical units from the Sun. It is inbound for an Earth flyby on 3 December 2026.
Europa Clipper is between planets and about to come home briefly. It launched on 14 October 2024, used Mars for a gravity assist on 1 March 2025, and is due to pass Earth on 3 December 2026 for a second one. Only after that does it leave for good, reaching Jupiter's system in April 2030.
It is the largest planetary spacecraft NASA has built. With the solar arrays extended it spans more than 30 m, about the length of a basketball court, and it needs that area because sunlight at Jupiter is a small fraction of what reaches Earth.
The plan is not to orbit Europa. Jupiter's radiation belts would kill the spacecraft quickly if it stayed inside them, so it will orbit Jupiter on a wide loop instead and make 49 close passes of the moon, dropping in, collecting data, and retreating to somewhere survivable to transmit it.
The instruments are already being exercised. During the Mars flyby the ice-penetrating radar, built to find the ocean under Europa's crust, was tested against Martian ground. Since then the spacecraft has photographed Uranus with its star tracker and observed the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.