Daily Image
19-04-2023
JUICE on its way to Jupiter
| Submitter: | Leonid Gurvits |
| Description: | On 14 April 2023, the ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission executed a spectacular lift-off onboard the Arian-5 heavy launcher in the cloudy sky over the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Over the first 28 hours of the flight, the spacecraft has passed all the mandatory check-ups and is declared fully fit for its challenging tasks. The science goal of the mission is a multidisciplinary study of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, with the focus on Ganymede, and the Jovian system as a whole. The mission breaks many records in exploration of space. JUICE is the heaviest interplanetary spacecraft ever built in Europe. It has the largest area of solar-cell panels (~85 m2) of any flown to date interplanetary spacecraft. But Guinness-style records aside, it is the expected science outcome of the mission which hopefully will open a new chapter in the exploration of the Solar system. The mission will run 11 scientific experiments. One of them is Planetary Radio Astronomy and Doppler Experiment (PRIDE) based on the VLBI technique in its near-field implementation. JIVE is the PI institute of this experiment. Besides JIVE, the PRIDE team includes Delft University of Technology, research organisations in Australia, France Hungary, as well as many partners of the European VLBI Network. PRIDE will assist in ultra-precise determination of the spacecraft state vector thus supporting a variety of studies ranging from fundamental physics to planetology and search of origins of life. For the next 8 years, the spacecraft will travel on a sophisticated trajectory with arrival to the Jovian system in 2031. Over the next three years the mission will conduct a multitude of experiments and observations of the Jovian moons Europa, Ganymede and Calisto, as well as Jupiter itself. More information on the JUICE mission is available at the ESA portal: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/Juice_launch_kit , https://www.esa.int/esatv/Sets/The_making_of_JUICE . |
| Copyright: | JIVE and TU Delft (left panel); ESA and Arianspace (right panel). |
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