JUICE passes final test before voyage to Jupiter’s moons

JUICE, the European mission to the moons of Jupiter, which hide oceans under their icy surfaces that are probably capable of supporting forms of life, has passed its final dry run. A test aimed at checking all the systems involved in the launch, which is scheduled to take place on April 13 at 14:15 with an Ariane 5, was successfully completed at the European base at Kourou, French Guiana.

Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are the three moons that the JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) mission is headed towards and each one hides beneath their icy surface more liquid than that contained in all of the Earth’s oceans. The aim is to find conditions possible for life: the mission will try to map out the oceans, to find out how deep they are and study the composition of the ocean floors.

This will be the job of JUICE’s 10 instruments, three of which were created in Italy with funding from the Italian Space Agency (ASI). They are the Rime radar system capable of penetrating the ice, the Janus camera that can obtain over a thousand images from one shot and the 3Gm instrument able to detect the slightest gravitational anomaly.

The National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), the Rome Sapienza and Roma Tre universities, the University of Trento and Naples’ Parthenope University contributed to making them. Italian industry played an important role too with the involvement of Leonardo and Thales Alenia Space (Thales-Leonardo). Then there is the Majis spectrometer, which is the fruit of an agreement between ASI and the French Space Agency (Cnes). The spacecraft’s solar panels, the largest to have ever flown in space, are Italian too as they were built at the Leonardo plant at Nerviano, in the province of Milan.