2023-04-17 09:45:56
The European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft JUICE lifted off aboard an Ariane 5 from the European Spaceport in French Guiana at 14:14 CEST on April 14, 2023. The successful launch marks the beginning of on an ambitious journey to discover the secrets of the subterranean ocean worlds orbiting the giant planet Jupiter.
Following the launch and separation of the rocket, ESA’s European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany confirmed the detection of the signal from the New Norcia ground station in Australia at 15:04 CEST. The 27 meter long ship’s solar panels were deployed in their characteristic cross shape at 15:33 CEST, ensuring that JUICE has sufficient power.
Jupiter, shining brightly in the night sky, has fascinated humanity since the first time our most ancient ancestors looked up at the starry sky and saw it. The astronomer Galileo Galilei put Jupiter in the spotlight in 1610, when he first observed the planet through a telescope and discovered moons orbiting around it.
Thanks to the legacy of previous Jupiter missions, we know that three of the largest moons on the planet (Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) harbor masses of liquid water under their surfaces in volumes far greater than those of all the oceans on Earth. These planet-sized moons offer us promising hints that the conditions for life could exist outside of our “pale blue dot,” and JUICE is equipped to bring us one step closer to answering this intriguing question.
JUICE is the last ESA science space mission to be launched on an Ariane 5, thus completing an era that began in 1999.
Over the next two and a half weeks, JUICE will deploy its various antennas and arms with scientific instrumentation that will study the environment of Jupiter and its major icy moons.
An eight-year journey with four gravity assist maneuvers through Earth and Venus will propel the spacecraft to its destination.
Artist’s impression of the JUICE ship flying through space. (Image: ESA)
Hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth and powered by a pinch of sunlight, JUICE will make 35 flybys of Jupiter’s oceanic moons on its mission.
In order to follow such a complex trajectory from such an enormous distance, and most crucially, for JUICE’s valuable data to reach Earth, precise navigation techniques will be required, relying on deep space antennas from the ESA in Spain, Argentina and Australia, all controlled remotely from the ESOC.
“The scientific treasure we will receive will undoubtedly have far-reaching implications for how we understand our solar system and whether there are potentially habitable places beyond Earth, not just in our own cosmic neighborhood, but also far beyond, in the vast number of exoplanets populating our universe,” says Olivier Witasse, ESA’s JUICE project scientist. “In turn, this knowledge will allow us humans to learn more about ourselves, our origins, and our place in the universe.” (Source: ESA)
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