The lights are green for an eight-year odyssey: the European space probe Juice is ready to explore Jupiter and its icy moons, in search of habitable environments for extraterrestrial life forms.
The Juice probe, explorer of the icy moons of Jupiter
Destination Jupiter: the European Juice probe in the starting blocks – Gallery
The Juice space probe at the ESA premises in Toulouse on January 20, 2023
The Juice probe, explorer of the icy moons of Jupiter
Flagship mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons explorer) will take off Thursday at 12:15 GMT from Kourou in French Guiana, aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, which will be the penultimate flight before launching. be replaced by Ariane 6.
“The weather conditions are good,” Marie-Anne Clair, the director of the Guiana Space Center, announced on Wednesday in the Jupiter control room, where personalities, including the King of the Belgians Philippe and the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, were gathered.
The probe of more than six tons is installed, solar panels folded, in the fairing of the launcher, ready to fly above the Guyanese forest, at 12:15 GMT. It will separate from the rocket 28 minutes after takeoff, at an altitude of 1,500 km, said Arianespace President Stéphane Israel.
Juice will then begin its long cruise to Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, approximately 628 million kilometers from Earth.
“It’s one of the most complex spacecraft ever sent to the outer solar system,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher.
Designed by Airbus, Juice carries ten scientific instruments (optical camera, imaging spectrometer, radar, altimeter, magnetometer, etc.), protected from extreme temperatures by a multi-layer insulation cover. The probe is also equipped with huge 85m2 solar panels – the size of a basketball court – to keep power in an environment where sunlight is 25 times weaker than on Earth.
The arrival is scheduled for July 2031. The journey promises to be winding since it is not possible to reach Jupiter by a direct trajectory.
The probe will have to go through complex maneuvers of gravitational assistance, consisting in using the force of attraction of other planets, like a catapult. By a flyby Moon-Earth first, then Venus (2025), then again Earth (2029), before taking its momentum towards the mastodon of the solar system and its largest moons, discovered by Galileo ago 400 years: Io the volcanic and its three frozen companions Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
liquid water oceans
The Jovian system has “all the ingredients of a mini-solar system”, explained Carole Mundell, science director for ESA. Its exploration “will make it possible to study how our solar system works, how the planets are formed”. And will attempt to answer, ultimately, the question “Are we alone in the Universe?” continued the astrophysicist.
Juice’s main quest is to find not life directly, but environments for it to appear. If gas planet Jupiter is uninhabitable, its moons Europa and Ganymede are ideal candidates: Beneath their icy surface they harbor oceans of liquid water – only liquid water makes life possible.
The future NASA Europa Clipper mission will target Europe. Juice, she targets Ganymede: in 2034, she should be placed in orbit around this natural satellite, the largest in the solar system comparable in size to the planet Mercury. It is also the only moon to have its own magnetic field protecting it from dangerous radiation.
Previous space missions have suggested the presence, between two thick crusts of ice, of a gigantic ocean, “several tens of kilometers, much deeper than the terrestrial oceans”, said Josef Aschbacher.
One of the questions is whether this liquid water interacts with the surface to be able to absorb its components. Which could then dissolve into nutrients, one of the conditions for the development of an ecosystem.
At a total cost of 1.6 billion euros, Juice is the first European mission to explore a planet in the outer solar system, which starts after Mars. “It’s the mission of a decade,” said Josef Aschbacher.
Its launch comes in the midst of a launcher crisis for Europe, virtually deprived of autonomous access to space after the departure of the Russian Soyuz rockets from Kourou, the cumulative delays of Ariane 6 and the failure of the first commercial flight of Vega C.
AFP