At the exact hour and second, the ambitious mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) to the icy moons of Jupiter was successfully launched.
Before the expectant gaze of scientists and thousands of people, one day later than scheduled, the powerful Ariane-5 rocket took off from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.
On board is the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice), a satellite that is expected to reach the orbit of the largest planet in the Solar System in just over eight years, in July 2031, and travel 6.6 billion kilometers.
It will not be a direct trip, since the rocket does not have the capacity to do so despite the fact that the orbits of Earth and Jupiter are “only” separated by 600 million kilometers.
Instead it will take a rather circuitous route through the interior of our Solar System that will use the gravity of Venus and Earth to propel it toward the gas giant.
After successfully completing the first phases of separation and deployment of the satellite’s huge 90-square-meter solar array system, the mission control operations director of the European agency in Darmstadt, Germany, could not hide his enthusiasm.
“We have a mission; we fly to Jupiter; we are loaded with questions. Jupiter, Juice is on the way! Get ready for it,” announced Andrea Accomazzo,
Below we offer you four highlights of this project.
The mission in which scientists from the European Space Agency have been working for about 15 years aims to study the main moons of Jupiter: Callisto, Ganymede and Europa.
These ice-covered worlds are believed to harbor vast reserves of liquid water, and there is intrigue as to whether these moons could support life.
It may sound like a fantasy since Jupiter is in the outer Solar System, far from the Sun and receiving only a 25th part of the light that falls on the Earth.
But the gravitational pressure the gas giant exerts on its moons means they potentially have the energy and heat to power simple ecosystems, much like those around volcanic vents on Earth’s ocean floors.
Juice will not look for specific “biomarkers” or try to detect alien fish in the deep sea.
Their mission is to learn more about the possibilities for habitability that future missions could investigate in more detail.
Scientists have long entertained the idea of placing landers on one of Jupiter’s icy moons to drill through its crust and reach the water below.
This could happen one day, perhaps in the second half of this century.
Professor Emma Bunce, director of the Space Institute at the University of Leicester and co-investigator of the JUICE J-MAG instrument, sees the mission as crucial to understanding whether life could ever exist beyond Earth.
It will do this by taking a close look at the ocean-covered moons of Jupiter.
“The Juice mission represents the next logical step in our exploration of potentially habitable worlds in the outer reaches of the Solar System,” Bunce explained.
“The Juice spacecraft will make it through multiple flybys of [las lunas] Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and finally from a specific orbit on Ganymede towards the end of the mission,” he added.
For Professor Leigh Fletcher, who has been on the Juice mission since 2008 and is one of the mission’s three interdisciplinary scientists, this is research that could have far-reaching implications.
“Juice provides a means to explore for the first time the interiors of potentially habitable ocean worlds in our Solar System, to the deep, dark, hidden oceans that might be the most suitable places for life in this system beyond Earth,” explained.
“If Juice can reveal that these distant icy worlds provide genuinely habitable environments, then it has profound implications for the continued search for life.”
Juice is the result of teamwork between scientists and experts who have spent years building it using special components made throughout the European continent.
Its cost is around US$1.7 billion and it is equipped with a set of 10 crucial instruments to carry out the mission.
“In this probe we have several high-resolution cameras at all possible wavelengths: in infrared, in the visible spectrum and in ultraviolet,” engineer Cyril Cavel explained to the BBC.
“All these instruments can be seen under transparent protective covers. The high-resolution visible telescope, called Janus, will take fantastic images very close to the moons, as we will fly over them at only 400 kilometers altitude. These will be impressive shots,” said the director. of the Juice project by Airbus.
A radar will also look inside the moons; lidar -a laser measurement system- will create three-dimensional maps of their surfaces; magnetometers will track their complex electrical and magnetic environments; and the sensors will take samples of the particles that buzz around them.
Juice is built like a heated tank.
Without shielding, its electronics would rapidly degrade in the harsh radiation that packs in around Jupiter.
And that long trip to Venus and then to the gas giant will cause temperatures outside the moon to range from 250°C to minus 230°C.
“We have two large chambers inside the aircraft to protect the computers from radiation and keep them at the same temperature through a network of pipes,” explains Séverine Deschamps, thermal architect at Airbus.
“The same goes for the propulsion system. It needs to be running around 20°C, quite warm, to get a good level of shooting performance.”
The ice-covered moons Callisto, Ganymede and Europa were discovered by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610, using the newly invented telescope.
Galilei could see them as small points revolving around Jupiter (he could also see a fourth body that we know today as Io, a much smaller world covered in volcanoes).
Their diameters range from 4,800 to 5,300 kilometers, considerably larger than our moon, which is about 3,500 kilometers in diameter.
“In the case of Europa, it is believed that there is a deep ocean, about 100 kilometers deep, under its icy crust,” explained Professor Emma Bunce.
“That depth is ten times greater than the depth of the deepest ocean on Earth, and we believe that ocean is in contact with rocky soil. So it’s a scenario where interesting mixing and chemistry occurs.” the researcher told the BBC.
Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System, is Juice’s ultimate goal.
It will end its journey there when it orbits this moon in 2034.
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