xli. JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer)
The European Space Agency (ESA) is ready to launch the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), an extraterrestrial spacecraft, with Airbus Defence and Space serving as the lead contractor. The mission will focus on three of Jupiter’s Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.
Long-standing theories among scientists suggest that Jupiter’s frozen moons may harbor life. In order to investigate whether there is life on Jupiter’s moons, conjecture is predicated on the idea that there is liquid water beneath the kilometers of ice sheets.
These moons are all thought to have sizable liquid water bodies beneath their surfaces, making them potentially habitable environments.
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JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) |
ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, will make detailed observations of the giant gas planet and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa – with a suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments. The mission will characterize these moons as both planetary objects and possible habitats, explore Jupiter’s complex environment in-depth and study the wider Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giants across the Universe. Few other nations’ space agencies have partnered with ESA on various levels for the JUICE mission:
The mission will consider two key themes of ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025:
Under these themes, Juice will explore-
Launch
Journey and orbit
JUICE builds on the previously proposed Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM-Laplace), a planned collaborative mission between ESA and NASA that would have carried out an in-depth study of the Jovian system and its icy moons. It is now foreseen that the Juice and NASA Europa Clipper spacecraft will be exploring the Jovian system simultaneously. JUICE builds on scientific and technological heritage from previous space missions – including ESA’s Mars Express, Venus Express, Rosetta, and BepiColombo. It will pave the way for future extensive exploration of the diverse extreme environments in the distant outer Solar System. JUICE will push significantly beyond the capabilities of previous missions like NASA’s Galileo (1989-2003), and directly complement the results of NASA’s Juno mission (2011–). |
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What will JUICE explore? |
JUICE will explore the secrets of Jupiter and tackle five key mysteries:
JUICE will be the first spacecraft to ever orbit a moon in the outer Solar System (Ganymede). |
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Jupiter and its moons |
Jupiter is the fifth planet from our Sun and is, by far, the largest planet in the solar system which is more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined. Jupiter’s stripes and swirls are actually cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water, floating in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot is a giant storm bigger than Earth that has raged for hundreds of years. Jupiter is surrounded by dozens of moons. Jupiter also has several rings, but unlike the famous rings of Saturn, Jupiter’s rings are very faint and made of dust, not ice.
Jupiter has the shortest day in the solar system. One day on Jupiter takes only about 10 hours (the time it takes for Jupiter to rotate or spin around once), and Jupiter makes a complete orbit around the Sun (a year in Jovian time) in about 12 Earth years (4,333 Earth days). Its equator is tilted with respect to its orbital path around the Sun by just 3 degrees. This means Jupiter spins nearly upright and does not have seasons as extreme as other planets do. Moons Jupiter forms a kind of miniature solar system with four large moons and many smaller moons.
Jupiter’s four largest moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto – were first observed by the astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610 using an early version of the telescope.
While planet Jupiter is an unlikely place for living things to take hold, the same is not true of some of its many moons.
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Missions to explore Jupiter |
Jupiter is not only an interesting scientific destination but also an important waypoint for spacecraft heading further into the Solar System. The gas giant’s immense gravity field can provide a boost and trajectory change for spacecraft heading to even further destinations. Past missions
Active missions
Future missions
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Challenges for the JUICE mission |
JUICE will build on the scientific and technological advancements made by earlier NASA and ESA planetary missions. The most difficult engineering issues are:
These issues are in addition to the programmatic challenges to maintain cost and schedule. On the operation side, the mission controllers will need to perform complex satellite navigation in both the inner solar system and the Jupiter system. |
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Significance of JUICE mission |
By studying Jupiter and its moons, JUICE will help astrobiologists understand how habitable worlds might emerge around gas giant planets.
JUICE will provide the first subsurface sounding of the moon, including the first determination of the minimal thickness of the icy crust over the most recently active regions. The JUICE mission will also characterize the diversity of processes in the Jovian system that may provide a stable environment on the icy moons at geologic time scales, including gravitational coupling between the Galilean moons and their long-term tidal influence on the system as a whole. JUICE and Europa Clipper will provide ground-breaking information, through their monitoring of the Jovian system elements, about the planet’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and plasma environment, and about the exospheres of the icy moons. Understanding of the development and dynamics of the Jovian system will be improved by JUICE’s broad new observations of Jupiter’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and interaction with the satellites. JUICE is an extremely intriguing project that follows in the footsteps of the Cassini-Huygens mission since it allows international involvement of a significant number of individuals interested in a variety of significant science issues. |