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The European space probe Juice was successfully launched this Friday, aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, towards Jupiter and its icy moons with the mission of searching for favorable environments for forms of extraterrestrial life.
The rocket lifted off from the European space center in Kourou, French Guiana, at 12:14 p.m. (GMT time), 24 hours after its launch was postponed due to the risk of storms.
The probe separated from the launch rocket, as planned, 27 minutes after liftoff, at an altitude of about 1,500 kilometers.
The Ariane 5 mission “is a success,” said Stéphane Israël, president of Arianespace.
Thus began an eight-year odyssey for Juice, the name from the English acronym for Explorer of the Icy Moons of Jupiter, the lighthouse mission of the European Space Agency (ESA).
On Thursday, when the launch was originally planned, the space center teams decided to interrupt takeoff operations due to the risk of lightning, a few minutes before the final countdown.
Contrary to classic launches that have a certain margin to take off, the launch window of the Juice probe is barely one second due to the particular orbit it must reach.
“It is the most complex probe ever sent to Jupiter,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher in the Jupiter control room at the Guyana space center.
“It is an extraordinary mission that shows everything that Europe is capable of,” added Philippe Baptiste, president of the French National Center for Space Studies.
In Jupiter’s satellites, the probe will search for environments conducive to the appearance of extraterrestrial life forms. It will not reach its destination until 2031, more than 620 million kilometers from Earth, at the end of a hectic journey.
oceans under ice
Not being able to head directly towards Jupiter, the spacecraft will have to execute complex gravity assist maneuvers that consist of using the pull of other planets to gain speed.
Thus, the device will circle the Moon and the Earth, then Venus (2025) and Earth again (2029) before heading towards the gas giant of the solar system and its large moons discovered by Galileo 400 years ago: the volcanic Io and the frosts Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
Juice’s main mission is to find suitable environments for the appearance of life forms.
Jupiter is uninhabitable, but its moons Europa and Ganymede arouse hope: under their icy surface, they hide oceans of liquid water, one of the elements considered essential for life.
Juice’s main target is Ganymede, the largest satellite in the solar system and the only one with a magnetic field that protects it from radiation. Around 2034 it should reach its orbit.
The probe will analyze the composition of its ocean, to see if an ecosystem could develop in it.
Conceived by Airbus, Juice has ten scientific instruments, including an optical camera, imaging spectrometer, radar, altimeter and magnetometer.
It is also equipped with huge 85-square-meter solar panels (the size of a basketball court) to harvest energy in an environment where sunlight is 25 times weaker than on Earth.
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.
Its launch came at the height of the launcher crisis in Europe, almost deprived of autonomous access to space after the departure of Russian Soyuz rockets from Kourou, the accumulated delays of Ariane 6 and the failure of the first commercial flight of Vega C.
