Deployment problems in a JUICE mission antenna

28 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –

One of the antennas of the ESA JUICE mission, which took off on april 14 towards Jupiter and its oceanic moons, it has not yet been deployed as planned.

During the first week of commissioning, a problem arose with the 16 meter long Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antennawhich prevents it from coming loose from its mounting bracket.

The RIME instrument is an ice penetrating radar designed to study the surface and subsurface structure of Jupiter’s icy moons to a depth of 9 km.

It is one of ten instruments aboard ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, JUICE, to investigate the rise of habitable worlds around the gas giants and the formation of our Solar System.

Work continues to free up the radar and the teams at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, together with partners in science and industry, have many ideas up their sleeves.

Every day the RIME antenna shows more signs of movement, visible in images from the Juice Monitoring Camera aboard the spacecraft with a partial view of the radar and its mount. Now partially extended but still stowed away, the radar is about a third of its full intended length.

The main current hypothesis is that a small stuck pin has not yet given way to the release of the antenna. In this case, it is thought that just a matter of millimeters could make the difference. to clear the rest of the radar.

There are still several options available to push the important instrument out of its current position. The next steps to fully deploy the antenna include turning on the motor to shake the spacecraft a bit, followed by a series of rotations that will spin JUICE, heating up the mount and radar, which are currently in the cold shadows.

Otherwise, JUICE is performing “excellent”, According to an ESA statement, following the successful deployment and operation of its mission-critical solar arrays and medium-gain antenna, as well as its 10.6m magnetometer arm.

With two months remaining on the planned commissioning, there is plenty of time for the teams to get to the bottom of the RIME implementation problem and continue working on the rest of the powerful instrument suite on its way to investigate the outer Solar System, it adds.