We love to go further, think further, dream further. And in principle all that is fine, it keeps us moving. The problem is what that “beyond” usually means. It means going one step further than we have gone so far, and therefore it is an ever-expanding frontier. What used to fascinate us is now normalized. We are only concerned with getting over it, and along the way, we allow the fascination to wear off quickly. For example, it was not so long ago that the news about Venus, Mars or Jupiter were the queens of the science sections. Now, although they are interesting, they fall into second or third place. We have gone one step further and, in that constant expansion of borders, our planetary neighbors look banal. Now we are concerned with exoplanets, those found in other solar systems, several light years from here.
We may think that it makes sense and that, as we said, this ability to forget the solved challenges to focus on those that remain to be solved helps us to advance as a civilization. However, there is a small error: our solar system is not a closed problem. It continues to cover an endless amount of unanswered questions. Why is Mars so different from Earth if in other ways we are so similar? How exactly did the Moon form? Or, the biggest question of all: Is there life in the rest of our Solar System? For this reason it is healthy that, from time to time, we turn our attention to our neighborhood and this is an ideal moment to do it, because today, the ESA will launch a mission that will explore Jupiter and its icy moons. Moons like Europa, which have two or three times the amount of water there is on Earth.
The mission will take off today, at 2:15 p.m. peninsular time, from French Guiana, specifically from the European spaceport of Kourou. Your name? JUICE, which in Spanish means “juice”, but which, how could it be otherwise, is an acronym: JUICE would mean Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Icy Moons of Jupiter Explorer). A rather appropriate name considering that its main objective is Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, and that this mission will be the first to orbit a moon other than our own. But, before explaining everything that JUICE intends to study in the surroundings of Jupiter, we have to talk about a matter of time.
It’s exciting to think that this mission will look for signs of life on other moons, but there’s some bad news: the journey to Jupiter isn’t exactly short. Try to estimate in your head how long it will take for a probe to cross those 800-odd million kilometers that separate us from Jupiter. You may be calculating it as you read these lines, but I have bad news. It is possible that, although you are right with the time, you have not calculated it too well. The answer is 8 years, but because to get there, the probe will have to do something called “gravity assists”, so when orbiting a planet, you take advantage of the planet’s gravity to accelerate your probe, as if you were stealing energy from it. In other words: the JUICE mission will take off today, but it will not stop maneuvering between Earth and our moon until August of next year.
Hopefully a year after that, in 2025, it will have arrived at Venus, where it will continue to orbit. And yes, of course the ESA experts know that Venus is in the interior of the solar system while Jupiter and its moons are on the periphery, but don’t worry, because in September 2025 JUICE will orbit our planet again to do some maneuvers and it will not leave us completely until January 2029. Ultimately, the probe will not reach Jupiter until July 2031 and, although it will fly over other icy moons of Jupiter for 3 years, it will reach its main destination, Ganymede in December 2034, within over 11 and a half years.
The three moons of Jupiter that the JUICE mission will explore are Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Each of them has a peculiarity that makes it especially interesting for space exploration. For example, in the case of Ganymede, which is the main objective of this mission, we are facing the largest moon of Jupiter, almost the size of the planet Mercury. The most striking thing about Ganymede, possibly, is that it is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field, which JUICE will study. This moon has a multitude of geological and physical details that can help us understand what the gaseous planets in the universe and their moons are like, extrapolating what we find on it and generalizing it, in a certain way, to the rest of the cosmos.
Callisto, for her part, will be a kind of window to the past that will allow us to contemplate the first moments of the Jovian neighborhood, that is, the surroundings of Jupiter while it was being formed. Europa, on the other hand, offers something much more fanciful, because it hides an ocean of liquid water under its ice crust. An ocean with more water than we can find on the entire Earth, despite the fact that this moon measures 1,500 kilometers in radius compared to our 12,000. JUICE will be in charge of looking for signs of life on Europa and will try to understand the nature of this ocean.
These are just some of the unknowns that remain in our solar system. You don’t have to travel light years to be amazed. It is fantastic that we can see beyond what decades ago was already “beyond”, but we must not forget how ignorant we continue to be and that lands that we normally consider fully explored actually still hide all kinds of dragons. JUICE will take years to complete its mission, but in the meantime, hundreds of small projects from the different space agencies on the planet will see the light of day. Releases, photos, sounds and each one of them is an adventure.
DON’T GET IT:
- Although JUICE is currently the protagonist, it is not the only space mission that will visit our gas giant relatively soon. JUNO and Europa Clipper accompany her, forming a really interesting trio. Space missions are not things that can be organized in a hurry. Designing them, putting them into operation, reaching their goal, sending us the data and having us analyze it is a true odyssey. For this reason, although we have suspected the great scientific interest of Jupiter’s icy moons for a few decades now, we have had to wait a long time for the launch of these missions. JUNO arrived at Jupiter in 2016 and Europa Clipper will arrive in 2030, both from NASA.
- Although the JUICE mission is led by ESA, it does not mean that it is the only agency involved. NASA has contributed to the design and production of several JUICE instruments. On the other hand, JAXA, which is the Japanese space agency, has done the same with other instruments and, finally, ISA (Israel’s space agency), has provided the hardware for a specific instrument. This collaboration does not always occur, although it is common for different agencies to join efforts to make this type of mission possible. After all, sending anything at such distances to take measurements remotely is a daunting task where the most cutting-edge science from each line of research needs to be applied.
REFERENCES (MLA):
- JUICE – Launch Kit (ESA) (don’t date) Google. Google. Available at: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adobe-acrobat-pdf-edit-co/efaidnbmnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj?hl=en-GB (Accessed: April 12, 2023).
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