The JUICE probe will be launched this Thursday, April 13 from Kourou by an Ariane 5 rocket. This European Space Agency (ESA) mission aims to discover underground oceans on the moons that revolve around Jupiter. Take-off will be broadcast live at the Cité de l’Espace in Toulouse.
Like many scientists involved in the JUICE mission, Arnaud Boutonnet will experience the launch, live, from the Kourou spaceport. Engineer at the European Space Agency (ESA), expert in flight dynamics and mission analysis manager for JUICE, he will share his impressions with the public at the Cité de l’Espace via video.
How do we prepare for the launch of such a mission which involves more than 7 years of travel to Jupiter?
Takeoff remains a moment of excitement and anxiety, the culmination for me of 17 years of trajectory calculation. The trip to Jupiter will not be the most difficult part for the JUICE mission, we rely in particular on the experience of previous missions such as Rosetta, BepiColombo, Solar Orbiter. Using the tools we have, we are trying to improve our proposals, to calculate which planets we will fly over, in what order and on what dates. Where it’s going to get complicated is when Jupiter approaches, because we worked with few tools, being at the limit of research, everything had to be invented!
So you did some discovery work?
Yes quite. When we arrive at the interplanetary phase, we fly over five planets, which is relatively simple. But when we are in the part around Jupiter, we have to fly 35 times over three of Jupiter’s moons (Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) with a lot of scientific objectives to fulfill. On average, for three years, we will have an overview every month, which involves a lot of operational constraints to take into account. The classic methods for defining the trajectory during the interplanetary phases no longer work at all, everything had to be invented.
The launch of the mission, this Thursday, is not an end point for you?
Exactly, we will continue to work after the shot to continue improving JUICE’s trajectory. After the launch, it will be eight years before the science begins, with critical moments like the phase of putting into orbit around Jupiter where, if something goes wrong, we risk losing the mission. Once arrived around Jupiter, if JUICE misses the flyby of a moon, we can always call on us to recalculate a new trajectory, we will be involved until the end. I started working on JUICE when I was a student and when I retire, this mission will still not be finished, it is only in space that this kind of case arises!
Today, the general public knows little about missions like JUICE and turns more readily to manned flights or projects on the Moon. How to entice him?
I don’t really look for arguments because what motivates me are the scientific objectives of the search for life. Until the 1980s, we always looked for life on the surface of a planet exactly like on Earth and then we thought that there could be life at the bottom of the oceans, in complete darkness. and we started looking for oceans in the solar system. And finally, JUICE is that, it’s going to see these worlds where potentially life can emerge. Like the James Webb Space Telescope or Mars missions that search for life, JUICE is a mission that offers extraordinary science and dreams.