The critical radar antenna on the Jupiter-bound spacecraft is no longer obstructed
Cape Canaveral, Florida. The critical radar antenna on the Jupiter-bound Europa spacecraft is no longer jammed.
Air traffic controllers in Germany released the 52-foot (16-meter) antenna on Friday after nearly a month of trying.
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter IC Moons Explorer satellite, nicknamed Juicy, blasted off in April on a decade-long journey. Shortly after launch, a small pin refused to budge, preventing the antenna from opening fully.
The controllers tried to shake the spacecraft to warm it up. Wiggling backwards finally did the trick.
It is suspected that the radar antenna harbors underground oceans and the possibility of life under the icy crusts of three of Jupiter’s moons. Those moons are Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.
The juice will try to spin around Ganymede. No spacecraft other than the Moon has ever orbited the Moon.
The news is not good for NASA’s Lunar Flashlight spacecraft. After months of failed attempts to get a CubeSat into lunar orbit, the space agency departed Friday.
The Lunar Flashlight was launched in December and is supposed to hunt ice in the dark craters of the Moon’s south pole. Now it is heading back toward Earth and then into deep space, continuing to orbit the sun.
___
The Associated Press receives support from the Health and Science Division of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Education Group. AP is solely responsible for all content.
