The launch of the European Juice probe to Jupiter, scheduled for Thursday aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, has been postponed until Friday due to bad weather conditions, Arianespace announced. The space probe of the European Juice mission will therefore set off 24 hours after a first attempt in the direction of Jupiter and its icy moons, in search of habitable environments for extraterrestrial life.
Liftoff from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana is scheduled for 12:14 GMT, half an hour earlier than the scheduled takeoff time during the first attempt. It will therefore be necessary to wait until 2:14 p.m. with us to see the rocket take off.
On Thursday, teams from the Guiana Space Center interrupted operations due to a risk of lightning, just minutes before the final count, while several personalities, including the King of the Belgians Philippe and the French astronauts Thomas Pesquet and German Matthias Maurer , had come to watch the launch from Jupiter’s control room.
“To take off, we need three parameters to be green: the preparation of the launcher, the availability of the probe, and the weather which is the last suspense“, he added. If the high winds, relatively predictable, are announced to be green for this Friday, “it will be necessary to continue to monitor the risks of lightning until the last moment“, warns Mr. Israel.
While leaving to explore Jupiter and its icy moons, the probe is in search of habitable environments for extra-terrestrial life forms. It will not reach its destination until 2031, more than 620 million kilometers from Earth, after an eventful journey.