Europe is about to launch one of its most ambitious missions ever – Ars Technica

As soon as Thursday morning, the European Space Agency will launch a large probe to Jupiter to study some of the giant planet’s most interesting moons.

With a mass of 6 metric tons, the Jupiter Lunar Explorer for Ice — or JUICE — is the largest deep-space mission ever launched by the European Space Agency and one of the largest launched by any country to the outer planets. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket at 8:15 a.m. ET (12:15 UTC) from Kourou, French Guiana. It will be broadcast live ESA WebTV.

The European Space Agency has conducted high-profile science missions before, including the audacious landing of the Rosetta spacecraft on a comet in 2014 that attracted worldwide attention. Europe also built the Huygens probe, which flew on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to Saturn and then landed on the moon Titan.

But JUICE, which cost about 1.5 billion euros, is the first of the agency’s L-class missions, which aim to be the space agency’s flagship and will only fly once a decade. Notably, the mission was selected by the European Space Agency in 2012, and it only missed its original target launch date by one year. The spacecraft was built by Airbus Defense and Space.

Europa decided to launch the mission after NASA’s Galileo and Cassini probes discovered that some of the moons around Jupiter and Saturn were covered in ice and likely harbored large subsurface oceans where microbial life might exist.

“The next logical step was to return to Jupiter with improved instruments to study the oceans in detail,” said Nicholas Altobelli, an ESA planetary scientist involved in the JUICE mission. “With that in mind, we wanted to see if these were potential habitats for life.”

Because the spacecraft is so massive, it would require several planetary flybys to build up power to reach the Jovian system. After its launch, JUICE will fly by Earth three times, in addition to Venus, before entering orbit around Jupiter in 2031. Then, from 2031 to 2034, it will make nearly thirty flybys of Ganymede, Europa and Callisto, for ice exploration. Shells in more detail.

JUICE will drop to within 200 kilometers of some of these worlds, giving us our best look yet at them. Among its tools are a high-resolution optical camera called Janus, a spectrometer, ice-penetrating radar, a magnetometer, and more. If everything aboard the spacecraft works as designed, it should deliver some dynamite science. The mission has many scientific goals, including understanding the composition of Jupiter’s moons and how they have changed to become different from each other.

The European spacecraft will also make a complementary flight to NASA’s European Clipper, which is scheduled to launch in 2024. It will carry various instruments and, together, will conduct a comprehensive study of the habitability potential of the subterranean oceans of exoplanet worlds. Their findings may point to a promising site for one day sending a lander for further investigation and a possible search for life.

After many orbits around Jupiter, in late 2034 Juice is set to enter orbit around Ganymede, where it will remain for another year. This would be a delicate maneuver since no spacecraft has ever entered orbit around a moon other than our own.

“This is definitely the first very complex navigation flight,” Altobelli said. “But Ganymede is a really interesting moon. It has its own magnetic field, and we think from the Galileo data that it has an inner ocean. We hope to carry out the most detailed analysis of the moon’s interior ever done.”