A spacecraft bound for Jupiter, launched two weeks ago, has disrupted a critical antenna, the European Space Agency said on Friday. According to the space agency, the 52-foot (16-meter) long radar antenna on the Juice only covered one-third of the way after launch.
Engineers suspect that the small pin may have popped out. Flight controllers in Germany plan to fire up the spacecraft’s engine in hopes of loosening the pin. If that doesn’t work, they said they had plenty of time to fix the problem.
Jus, short for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, won’t reach the giant planet until 2031. To get there, one must take a detour, including the gravity-assisted flight of Earth, our Moon, and Venus.
The radar antenna needs to look under the icy crusts of Jupiter’s three moons, which are likely to contain subsurface oceans and possibly life, which is the main target of the nearly $1.8 billion mission. Its targets include Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System.
The space agency said everything else about the small bus-sized spacecraft worked well. A radio antenna, solar arrays, and a 35-foot (10.6-meter) mast have been successfully deployed to measure Jupiter’s magnetic field.