Juice’s Jovian odyssey

From the creator

Juice, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, is set to embark on a seven-year cruise to Jupiter starting May 2022. The mission will investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants and the Jupiter system as an archetype for the numerous giant planets now known to orbit other stars. This animation depicts the journey to Jupiter and the highlights from its foreseen tour of the giant planet and its large ocean-bearing moons. An Ariane 5 will lift Juice into space from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou. A series of gravity-assist flybys at Earth (3), Venus (1) and Mars (1) will set the spacecraft on course for its October 2029 rendezvous in the Jovian system. It is expected that a number of instruments will be activated during the gravity assists (indicated by the different coloured beams scanning across the planets) and measurements will be taken for calibration and to check the health of the instruments. The visualisations of the Earth flybys show the closest approaches over the planet according to current planning – over the South Pacific Ocean, Argentina and Peru, respectively. Throughout the animation, the instrument beam colours correspond to example observations by JANUS (green), MAJIS (red), UVS (purple), Gala (Blue) and RIME (grey), which are cameras, spectrometers, laser altimeter and radar. During the Venus flyby, limited observations can be made because the spacecraft will be oriented to protect it from the heat of the Sun experienced in the inner Solar S

Published 2019-02-06 · Watch on YouTube ↗
Availability and playback restrictions are controlled by the original channel.