Description
The European spacecraft JUICE will embark on an eight-year odyssey through the solar system to find out if the oceans hidden beneath the surface of Jupiter's icy moons have the potential to harbor extraterrestrial life. For now, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is in a clean room at its manufacturer Airbus in Toulouse, southwestern France. But his days on this planet are numbered. Soon the spacecraft will be placed in a container, wings carefully folded, before heading to the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, off the coast of South America, in early February.
From there, one of Europe's most ambitious space missions will launch in April.
The Toulouse scientists and engineers who have been working on the project for years are visibly excited by the idea of saying goodbye to what they call "the beast."
Ils ont finally dévoilé le vaisseau spatial de six tons aux journalistes vendredi - montrant ses 10 scientific instruments, an antenna of 2.5 mètres (huit pieds) de diamètre pour communicator avec la Terre et une vast range of panneaux solaires qui doivent encore être testés one last time .
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As a parting gift, a commemorative plaque was placed on the rear of the spacecraft in honor of the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who first saw Jupiter and its largest moons in 1610.
Volcanic Io and its icy sisters Europa, Ganymede and Callisto were "the first moons discovered outside our own," said Cyril Cavel, Airbus project manager for JUICE.
Cavel was carrying a copy of Galileo's "Sidereus Nuncius," the first treatise based on observations made through a telescope.
More than 400 years later, JUICE will provide a much clearer picture of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, before becoming the first spacecraft to orbit one of Jupiter's moons.
The Earth is "like a catapult"
It will be the first European space mission to venture into the outer solar system, which begins beyond Mars.
Jupiter is more than 600 million kilometers (370 million miles) from Earth and JUICE will take a circuitous route before its scheduled arrival in July 2031.
The spacecraft will travel a total of two billion miles, using gravity from Earth, and then Venus, to propel itself along the way.
"It's like a catapult that propels us towards Jupiter," said Nicolas Altobelli, JUICE project scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA).
The additional travel time will allow JUICE's solar arrays, which cover an area of 85 square meters, the largest ever built for an interplanetary spacecraft, to absorb as much energy as possible.
It will need that energy once it crosses the "frost line" between Mars and Jupiter, when temperatures could drop to minus 220 degrees Celsius.
JUICE will then need to carefully apply the brakes to enter Jupiter's orbit. For this part, it's all alone.
“We will follow the maneuver from Earth without being able to do anything. If it fails, the mission is lost," Cavel said.
From Jupiter's orbit, the satellite will make 35 flybys of Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. It will then enter the orbit of Ganymede, the largest of the three, before finally falling back to its surface.
Don't look for "big shots"
JUICE's ice-penetrating cameras, sensors, spectrometers, and radars will probe the moons to determine if they might be habitable to past or present life.
It will not look at the frozen surface of the moons, but 10 or 15 kilometers below, where vast liquid oceans flow.
This extreme environment could harbor bacteria and single-celled organisms.
But the mission will not be able to detect "large fish or creatures," said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher.
Instead, it will search for conditions capable of supporting life, including liquid water and a source of energy, which could come from the tidal effect Jupiter's gravity has on its moons.
Measuring magnetic signals could determine if Ganymede's water is in contact with its rocky core, allowing the chemicals necessary for life to "dissolve in the water," Altobelli said.
NASA's Clipper mission will launch in 2024 as part of its own quest to study Europa.
If one of the moons turns out to be a particularly good candidate for hosting life, the "logical next step" would be to send a spacecraft to land on the surface, Cavel said.
He added that he was moved by the idea that JUICE "will end his life on the surface of Ganymede."
