Latest News, International – The European Space Agency (ESA) on Friday (14/4/23) launched the Ariane 5 rocket carrying the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) from the European Space Port in French Guiana.
According to ESA, the successful launch marks the start of an ambitious journey to uncover the secrets of the ocean worlds of Jupiter’s three largest moons: Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, which hold a much larger volume of subsurface water than Earth’s oceans.
“This planet-sized moon is providing us with important clues that conditions for life may exist other than here in our ‘pale blue dot’,” the ESA said in a press release, as quoted Xinhua News.
Over the next two and a half weeks, Juice will be deploying various antennas and boom its instruments, including a 16 meter long radar antenna, boom a 10.6-metre-long magnetometer, and other instruments that will study Jupiter’s surroundings and beneath the icy surface of the moon, the agency said.
Juice will also deeply monitor Jupiter’s magnetic complexes, radiation and plasma environment and their interactions with the moon, thereby studying Jupiter’s system as an archetype of gas giant systems throughout the Universe.
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Juice is designed to undertake an eight-year voyage by flying past Earth and Venus to point it directly at Jupiter.
The cruiser will make 35 close passes (flyby) on the three major moons as they orbit Jupiter, before changing orbits to Ganymede, the agency said.
