Europe’s space agency is preparing to launch a mission to Jupiter that would have made Galileo Galilei proud. The JUICE spacecraft will study three of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kalleheikki Kannisto
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer craft is currently positioned atop an Ariane 5 rocket at the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, and is set to launch at 9:15 local time on 13 April. “There is no launch window, only one launch instant,” said programme director and launch operator Véronique Loisel at Arianespace, during a press briefing in Kourou last week.
As is the case for all missions to the outer Solar System, JUICE’s trajectory will be anything but direct. It will first make a Venus fly-by, in 2025 — which will expose it to high temperatures — after which it will fly past Earth twice more, in 2026 and 2029. It will arrive at Jupiter in 2031, at which point its main engine will perform a long retro-burn to slow down and begin orbiting the planet.
The JUICE spacecraft is unpacked at the spaceport in French Guiana in preparation for final checks and fuelling.In 2035, JUICE will fire up its main engine again to enter orbit around Ganymede, at an altitude of 500 kilometres, for at least 9 months. This will be a delicate manoeuvre, says Scott Bolton, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
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