The first European mission to Jupiter is set to begin on April 13 with the penultimate Ariane 5 flyby. Rocket Ariane 5 It rolls onto a pad in Kourou, French Guiana, on April 11 with the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE. The launch is scheduled for 08:15 ET on April 13 in the instant launch window.

The launch will begin a long journey for the six-ton ​​spacecraft. It will make several gravity-powered flybys of Earth and Venus between August 2024 and January 2029, before arriving at Jupiter in mid-2031. When it arrives at Jupiter, it will make 35 flybys of the major moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto before orbiting Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System.

“The main goal is to understand whether there is a habitable environment between these icy moons,” Olivier Vitass, JUICE project scientist at ESA, told a briefing on April 6. Said. “We will specifically characterize oceans of liquid water inside icy moons.”

JUICE will conduct these observations with a team of 10 science instruments provided by NASA, one of which is an ultraviolet spectrograph. Some other tools include contributions from NASA, the Japanese space agency JAXA, and the Israel Space Agency. JUICE will be joined by NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which is scheduled to begin in October 2024 and arrive at Jupiter in 2030. This spacecraft will make dozens of flights to Europa to study the potential for life on this icy moon.

Vitasse said it would be “so great” to have Europa Clipper and JUICE working simultaneously on the Jovian system. “The two tasks are very complementary” with the possibility of joint observation. An example is the scheduled flight of Europa by two spacecraft, four hours apart.

JUICE will enter lunar orbit in late 2034 and will focus more on Ganymede, which will remain there until the end of the mission currently scheduled for September 2035. This orbit will be at an altitude of 500 kilometers, but only if there is enough fuel left. He said he could lower the orbit of the spacecraft to 200 kilometers.

JUICE will eventually fall to the surface of Ganymede. We can “hit the surface with the information we have about Ganymede” without violating planetary protection principles to avoid harmful contamination. “We’ve shown that even if we hit the surface, we can’t pollute any subsurface ocean.”

The launch is the sixth Ariane 5 flight for ESA science missions. The rocket has previously launched the XMM-Newton X-ray Observatory, the Comet Rosetta mission, the Herschel and Planck observatories, the BepiColombo mission to Mercury, and most recently the James Webb Space Telescope, a mission that includes NASA-led Europa.

According to Véronique Loiselle, director of the JUICE project at Arianespace, preparation for the JUICE launch was similar to the Ariane 5 missions, except for the increased cleaning requirements. It’s similar to imaging satellite launches, he said, but with added pollution monitoring, which is also used to launch JWST.

This launch is also the penultimate flight of Ariane 5. The final launch of the vehicle will be at the end of June with the Syracuse 4B military communications satellite for France and the Heinrich Hertz communications satellite for the German government.

“Every day? Never. Does it have any special meaning? Yes,” said Rüdeger Albat, program manager for Ariane 5 at ESA, about the rocket’s recent launches. He said there is an increased monitoring and qualification program for these recent launches, but other than that, operations are as close to normal as possible.

He compared these recent launches to an airline pilot’s last flight before retiring. “It will fly with great care, but stick to nominal operations as much as possible.”