Europe is prepared to launch its mission to Jupiter’s ice moons
According to a Jan. 20 announcement from the satellite’s maker, Airbus, Europe’s next flagship space project will launch from French Guiana in April to examine three of Jupiter’s biggest frozen moons.
Final assembly and testing of the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) have been going on for about a year and a half in France with Airbus, who was chosen as the prime contractor back in 2015.
The attachment of a huge 100 square meter solar array, created by German company Azur Space, was part of the last preparations to make sure the spaceship had adequate electricity 740 million kilometers beyond the sun.
JUICE will be delivered by Airbus in early February to Arianespace’s launch facility in Kourou, French Guiana, where it will be launched on one of the two final Ariane 5 rockets before the launch of the Ariane 6 in late 2023.
According to Cyril Cavel, project manager for JUICE at Airbus Defense and Space, it took close to 500 Airbus personnel and more than 80 firms from around Europe to get the spacecraft ready for its trip to the Jupiter system.
The gravity-assist flybys in the inner solar system would take the 6,200 kilogram spacecraft around eight years to reach Jupiter’s orbit in July 2031.
JUICE is equipped with 10 equipment, including cameras, an ice-penetrating radar, a radio-science experiment, and sensors for monitoring altitude and other data, to explore the magnetic fields in the Jupiter system and perhaps ocean-bearing moons Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto.
The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to utilize JUICE to look under the frozen moon’s surface to see whether it may support microbial life.
The spacecraft has spent almost three and a half years circling Jupiter and completing flybys of Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. In December 2034, it is scheduled to enter orbit around Ganymede for a closer look at the biggest moon in the solar system.
ESA expects that JUICE would finally crash into Ganymede in late 2035 after completing a mission estimated to cost roughly 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion), having exhausted the fuel required to continue its orbit around the moon.
However, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which is set to launch in 2019 but enter Jupiter‘s orbit in 2030, will focus on determining if Europa has the building blocks for life.
