​In April, the European Space Agency is preparing for the launch of the JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) interplanetary probe, one of the most important European space missions. The probe will head to Jupiter, where it will focus on Jupiter’s moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, moons that have subsurface oceans where conditions could be favorable for life to develop. These are three of the four moons first identified by Galileo Galilei in 1610, but Io, which has active volcanism, will not visit JUICE.

These days, the JUICE probe, weighing more than 6 tons and costing 1.6 billion euros, is being prepared for transport from Toulouse to French Guiana, from where it will go to Jupiter in April aboard the European Ariane 5 rocket. In fact, before reaching its destination, it will make three flybys of Earth and one flyby of the planet Venus to adjust its trajectory to its final destination, the orbit of Jupiter, where it should arrive in December 2034.

It will also be the penultimate launch of the Ariane 5 rocket, which will soon be replaced by the new generation Ariane 6 rocket (initially, the JUICE probe was supposed to be the last launch of the Ariane 5 rocket, but the delayed launch of a telecommunications satellite changed plans at the European Space Center from French Guiana).

Why Jupiter? Because the enormous gravitational force of this planet causes the satellites around it to periodically contract and expand, which turns into a source of heat for the large interior oceans. And this makes them similar to the oceans on Earth (we also know that these oceans have salt from geysers that occasionally bubble up to the surface, so they can be much more easily probed by probes that fly over them). And a large expanse of salty water with a heat source could mean conditions conducive to life, at least for the forms of life we’re familiar with.

JUICE will not look for life on Jupiter’s moons

JUICE will not search for life on Jupiter’s moons, but will study these moons in detail, preparing possible future missions that will be better equipped to detect possible traces of life in these alien oceans (since Europa alone, although four times the size of Earth, contains twice as much water , than on our planet).

After JUICE settles comfortably into Jupiter’s orbit, it will conduct 35 flybys of the three mentioned moons from there, after which near the end of the mission, i.e. starting in 2034, JUICE will leave Jupiter’s orbit and become the first probe to orbit a Jupiter moon, thus thus spending the last years of his mission around Ganymede.

On board the probe are no less than 11 scientific instruments (mostly European, but some created in collaboration with NASA or JAXA) that will study the three moons of Jupiter, thus giving us in the next decade a much clearer picture of what is happening around Jupiter. the largest planet in our solar system.

But JUICE will not be the only probe around Jupiter: even now there is the American probe Juno, but it will most likely cease to be active in 2031. NASA is preparing a new mission to Jupiter: Europa Clipper. Scheduled to launch in October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket, the Europa Clipper will reach Jupiter orbit in 2030 (sooner than the Europa probe), from where it will conduct a series of flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Unfortunately, neither JUICE nor Europa Clipper will send probes to the surface of these moons, but future interplanetary missions will attempt to penetrate Europa’s 11-kilometer surface ice to directly reach the moon’s interior ocean.

But we will have to wait a few more decades for this type of mission.

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