The Ariane 5 flight of the European Space Agency (ESA), with the Juice mission on board heading to Jupiter, took off this Friday from the European Space Port in Kourou in French Guiana.
ESA's Juice mission, the 'Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer', begins a nine-year journey to the Jovian system, with the aim of analyzing the habitability of the gas giant planet and its three large oceanic moons (Ganymede, Callisto and Europa).
As reported by the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), which is also participating in this mission, it will be the first spacecraft to orbit a moon other than ours (Ganymede), and also the first to carry out a gravity assist maneuver Moon -Land to save fuel.
Juice will investigate, on the one hand, the appearance of habitable worlds around gas giants and, on the other, the Jupiter system as an archetype of the numerous giant exoplanets that orbit other stars.
The probe carries ten state-of-the-art instruments, including the most powerful remote sensing, geophysical payloads ever launched into the outer Solar System.
In fact, the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía who is participating in the mission, Luisa Lara, highlighted that "we are part of the international consortia that are building two of the mission's instruments, the Janus camera and the Gala altimeter, which will work in a complementary way to study the surface and interior of the satellites. Janus will also analyze the planet's atmosphere and obtain complementary data with those of other mission instruments."
The scientists noted that Juice will face challenges like no other European mission: for example, the sunlight collected by its solar panels will be 25 times weaker than what can be collected when orbiting the Earth.
The immense distances—hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth—require a large 2.5-meter-diameter antenna on board to guarantee sufficient transmission speeds for downloading scientific data.
In addition, Juice's complex trajectory around the Galilean moons will include an extraordinary number of gravity-assisted flybys. Also, entry into orbit around Ganymede will require precise navigation and skillful maneuvering.
Jupiter has more than 90 known satellites, including the four Galilean satellites, named after Galileo, its discoverer. These are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto which, together with Jupiter's faint ring and a trio of small moons (Amalthea, Metis and Thebe), form a mini solar system, with circular and flat orbits with respect to the planet's equator. .
The discovery of these four large moons revolving around Jupiter marked the beginning of the Copernican revolution, which overthrew the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe.
The Juice mission will study, over three years, the planet's turbulent atmosphere and magnetosphere; as well as the surface of Europa, where it will search for organic molecules; to finally focus on Ganymede, a satellite larger than Mercury and the only one in the Solar System with its own magnetic field.
