Sightings Of Ariane 5 Rocket Ready To Launch JUICE Mission To Jupiter Tomorrow!

The Ariane 5 rocket for VA260 flights carrying the European Space Agency (ESA) mission (photo: doc. ESA)

JAKARTA - The Ariane 5 rocket for flight VA260 carrying the European Space Agency (ESA) mission is fully integrated and ready to launch on April 13.

Ariane 5 will carry the JUpiter ICy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft from the European Spaceport in French Guiana.

JUICE is humanity's next daring mission beyond the Solar System. He will take an eight-year journey to Jupiter with an expected arrival in 2031.

During the trip, JUICE will use the help of gravity around Earth to make flybys and Venus to bring it to Jupiter, because the spacecraft does not carry a lot of fuel.

Arriving at their destination, JUICE will carry out detailed observations of the gas giant and the three large moons that carry the oceans, namely Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, as quoted from the ESA website, Wednesday, April 12.

The ambitious mission will survey these moons with a powerful set of remote sensing, geophysical, and in situ instruments to find more information about the Moon, claimed as a potential habitat for the past or present life.

The ESA researchers suspect that there may be an environment on the ocean floor that nurtures life like the thermal vents at the bottom of Earth's oceans.

The spacecraft will deeply monitor Jupiter's complex magnetic, radiation, and plasma environment and its interactions with moons, studying the Jupiter system as an archetype of gas giant systems throughout the universe.

"The hardest thing we wanted to do was try and measure the magnetic field from the electric current flowing in the ocean of liquid water on Ganymede," said Principal Investigator for the magnetometer onboard JUICE, Professor Michele Dougherty.

"That will allow us to know not only the depth of the oceans, but their salt content and hopefully get an idea of ​​whether it is the global ocean or whether it is just focused on the moon."