JUICE will be the first mission to orbit a moon other than Earth's ⬇️
JUICE's journey to Jupiter will take seven and a half years and involve three returns to Earth, where the spacecraft will receive gravity assists from our planet to adjust JUICE's trajectory. The spacecraft will also perform one such maneuver atThe spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter in December 2031 and will spend three years orbiting the planet and making close flybys of three of its main moons: Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
JUICE will perform 21 flybys of the most distant of the four main moons, Callisto, getting as close as 120 miles from its surface. Orbiting nearly 1.2 million miles from Jupiter, Callisto is a very different world than the lively Europa, which is believed to have water plumes squirting through its ice crust. At about the size of Mercury, Callisto is the second largest of Jupiter's moons, and has a crater-riddled surface that scientists think is the oldest in the solar system.
Although NASA's Europa Clipper will already be studying the potentially life-bearing Europa by the time when Juice arrives, the European mission also hopes to contribute to our understanding of the mysterious body. JUICE will carry 10 scientific instruments that, together with a similar package on Europa Clipper, will help scientists analyze Jupiter's moons and their potential to host life.
Scientists hope that these measurements will confirm the presence of oceans beneath the moons' icy crusts. The notion that these moons harbor massive water bodies that could potentially host life came from the Galileo mission, which measured odd disturbances in the magnetic field around Jupiter. Scientists attributed these anomalies to the motion of liquid inside Europa and Ganymede, Olivier Witasse, a JUICE project scientist at ESA, told Space.com.
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