The Juice mission will soon be launched to the frozen ocean worlds of Jupiter

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The European Space Agency is about to send a spacecraft to explore Jupiter and three of its largest and most intriguing moons.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, mission was due to lift off Thursday at 8:15 a.m. ET aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Kourou Spaceport in French Guiana. But a lightning risk postponed the launch, which was rescheduled for Friday at 8:14 a.m. ET.

Watch the launch live on the ESA website or YouTube channel.

Weather conditions can often cause launch delays and postponements. Specific weather criteria must be met for rockets to take off safely. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched aboard an Ariane 5 from the same location in December 2021, also experienced similar delays due to inclement weather conditions around Kourou.

Once launched, the spacecraft will separate from the Ariane 5 launcher after 28 minutes. Over the next 17 days, Juice will deploy its solar panels, antennas and other tools, followed by three months of testing and tool preparation.

It will take Juice eight years to reach Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. During its long cruise, the spacecraft will use some gravitational slingshots as it flies past the Earth, our moon and Venus to help us on the journey.

INTERACTIVE: The search for life in our solar system

Once Juice arrives at Jupiter in July 2031, the spacecraft will spend about three and a half years orbiting the gas giant and conducting flybys of three of its moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Toward the end of the mission, Juice will focus solely on orbiting Ganymede, making it the first spacecraft to orbit a moon in the outer solar system.

Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa are ice-covered worlds that may contain subterranean oceans that are potentially habitable for life.

Meanwhile, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, set to launch in 2024, is expected to reach Jupiter in April 2030 and conduct nearly 50 flybys of Europa, eventually reaching just 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the lunar surface.

Together, the two missions could unravel some of the biggest mysteries about Jupiter and its moons.

Exploration of Jupiter began with NASA’s Pioneer and Voyager missions in the 1970s, followed by dedicated Jupiter missions such as Galileo and the Juno spacecraft. Juno has been orbiting Jupiter and flying close to some of its moons since 2016.

The Juice mission has five major goals, including using its powerful suite of 10 instruments to characterize the three icy moons and determine whether they harbor oceans, discover what makes Ganymede so unique, and determine whether the moons are potentially habitable for life.

Planetary scientists want to know how deep the oceans are, whether they contain salty or fresh water, and how the water interacts with each moon’s ice shell. Ganymede, Callisto and Europa also have different surfaces. The juice could reveal what kind of activity made some of them appear dark and cratered or paler and grooved.

Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, larger than Pluto and Mercury, and is the only one that has an Earth-like magnetic field. Juices instruments can reveal the moon’s rotation, gravity, shape, internal structure and composition, and peer through its icy crust using radar.

Juice will also conduct a detailed analysis of Jupiter to determine how the complex magnetic and radiation environment around this massive planet shaped its moons, as well as how Jupiter formed in the first place. Understanding more about Jupiter’s origin story may help scientists apply these findings to Jupiter-like planets found outside our solar system.

Jupiter’s magnetic field is 20 times stronger than Earth’s and it has a harsh radiation environment, both of which impact its moons. The Juice mission was designed to uncover what happens as Jupiter interacts with its moons, including auroras, hot spots, radio emissions and charged particle waves.

Although the three moons are encased in thick shells of ice, internal heating could be occurring in each lunar core, and that heat could make the internal oceans possible habitats for past or existing life.

Juice can search the moons for evidence of the building blocks of life, including elements such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, and magnesium.

Previous missions such as Galileo and Cassini, which have visited Saturn and its moons, have confirmed that liquid water can be found on planets and moons far from the sun, and that water is likely to exist beneath the surface.

I think Juice is confirmation that our understanding of where to look for potential habitability has changed over the past 20 years, said Michele Dougherty, Royal Society research professor at Imperial College London and principal investigator of Juices magnetometer.

Life as we understand it on Earth requires liquid water, a source of heat and organic material, and so you need those first three ingredients to be stable enough for a long enough period of time for something to actually happen, Dougherty said. .

With Juice, we want to confirm that there is liquid water in these moons, confirm their heat sources. Other tools will be able to detect from a distance whether there is organic material on the surface as well. And so he’s putting all those ingredients together, she said.

The truck-sized Juices spacecraft was designed to survive a long journey to Jupiter and must survive the extremes of the gas giant environment once it arrives. Two cross-shaped solar arrays will provide power to the spacecraft, and lead-coated vaults will protect its most sensitive electronic components.

The ESA-led mission includes contributions from NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Testing and modeling of Jupiter’s radiation belts allowed engineers to prepare for what Juice will encounter.

A key result of this model for us was to demonstrate that what at first appeared to be a dangerous place was not completely out of reach, said Christian Erd, Juice spacecraft and system manager, in a statement. About three and a half years on Jupiter will result in the equivalent radiation exposure of a telecommunications satellite in geostationary Earth orbit for 20 years that we have a lot of experience handling.

To help Juice survive, its trajectory was designed to fly past Callisto 21 times, but only pass Europa twice. Europa is closest to Jupiter and sits well within its radiation halo. Just two orbits of the moon will cause the spacecraft to experience a third of its overall radiation exposure.

Some of Juices’ instruments are shielded, while others will be exposed to the elements to probe the atmospheres of Jupiter and its moons. Multiple imagers and sensors will capture and send data across different wavelengths of light.

Given the distance, if any, between the spacecraft and Earth, it will take 45 minutes to send a one-way signal to Juice. But that’s nothing compared to the years of waiting for Juice to get to Jupiter.

Scientists are already anticipating the unique data that Juice will return.

I think the most critical moment is the first flyby we have of Ganymede, Dougherty said. The first one or two flybys are when we will confirm the existence of an ocean.

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