Launch of European probe Juice towards Jupiter postponed to Friday

The launch of the European Juice probe to Jupiter, aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, was postponed to Friday due to bad weather conditions on Thursday.

The takeoff, scheduled at 12:45 GMT from the European base in Kourou, in French Guiana, was canceled a few minutes before due to the risk of lightning.

The next launch window will be Friday morning, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

The probe weighs more than two and a half tons and also carries four tons of fuel for years of maneuvering in space.

Juice, an acronym in English for Explorer of the Icy Moons of Jupiter, will take 8 years to reach its destination, whose distance from Earth ranges between 640 and 900 million kilometers.

“It is one of the most complex space objects ever sent into the outer solar system.”, stressed ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher.

Conceived by Airbus, Juice carries ten scientific instruments (optical camera, spectrometer, radar, magnetometer…), protected from extreme temperatures –and especially Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field– by a multi-layer insulation cover.

The probe is also equipped with huge 85m2 solar panels, to conserve power in an environment where sunlight is 25 times weaker than on Earth.

The arrival is scheduled for July 2031. The trip seems to be winding since the probe will have to carry out complex gravitational assistance maneuvers, which consist of using the attractive force of other planets as a catapult.

First it will make a Moon-Earth flyby, then it will go to Venus (2025), then it will return to Earth (2029), before taking its momentum towards the mastodon of the solar system and its four largest moons discovered by Galileo 400 years ago: the volcanic Io and her three icy companions Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

liquid water oceans

The Jupiter system has “all the ingredients of a mini solar system”, says Carole Mundell, director of science for ESA. Exploring it “will make it easier to study how our solar system works and how planets are formed. And she will try to finally answer the question “Are we alone in the universe?” Added the astrophysicist.

Juice’s main objective is not to find life directly, but rather favorable environments for its appearance. Although the gaseous planet Jupiter is uninhabitable, its moons Europa and Ganymede are ideal candidates: beneath its icy surface lie oceans of liquid water, and only liquid water makes life possible.

After three years repeatedly flying over Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, in 2034 Juice will enter orbit of the latter, the largest satellite in the solar system and the only one with a magnetic field.

Next year the US NASA will launch another mission to the Jovian system, Europa Clipper, bound for that satellite and which will arrive a year before Juice due to the choice of a shorter trajectory and a more powerful booster rocket.

Previous space missions suggest the presence, under the thick layers of the ice pack, of a gigantic ocean, “of several tens of kilometers, much deeper than the terrestrial oceans”, says Josef Aschbacher.

One of the questions is whether liquid water interacts with the rocky bottom to dissolve potentially nutrient elements, one of the conditions for the development of an ecosystem.

With a total cost of 1.6 billion euros, Juice is the first European mission to explore a planet in the outer solar system, starting beyond Mars. “It’s the mission of a decade”, emphasizes Josef Aschbacher.

Source: AFP