European Space Agency: Jupiter moons mission set for second launch bid
The Juice satellite was sent skyward on an Ariane-5 rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.
This might sound fanciful. Jupiter is in the cold, outer reaches of the Solar System, far from the Sun and receiving just one twenty-fifth of the light falling on Earth. "That depth of ocean is 10 times that of the deepest ocean on Earth, and the ocean is in contact, we think, with a rocky floor. So that provides a scenario where there is mixing and some interesting chemistry," the researcher told BBC News.Ariane doesn't have the heft to send Juice direct to its destination, at least not in a useful timeframe.
The icy trio range in diameter from 4,800km to 5,300km. To put this in context, Earth's natural satellite is roughly 3,500km across. Juice won't be looking for particular "biomarkers" or attempting to find alien fish at the depths of the ocean. In Earth's Antarctica, researchers use heat to bore hundreds of metres through the ice sheet to deploy submersibles in places where the local ocean is frozen over.
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