Here’s The Plan For Europe’s Juice Mission To Jupiter

The Juice mission will be launched using an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana (via ESA). The idea is to study Jupiter and its moons, in part to learn about whether habitable worlds could be found orbiting gas giant planets beyond our solar system. Gas giants are some of the most commonly identified exoplanets, so finding that they could support habitable worlds would open new avenues for searching for life elsewhere in the universe.

Europa is a particularly intriguing target in the search for habitable worlds because it is thought to have a liquid ocean beneath an icy crust, and water is a key requirement for life as we know it. To investigate further, Juice will perform two flybys to look at both its surface composition and to search for pockets of liquid water beneath its surface. It will also look at the moon’s atmosphere and investigate the plumes of water which previous missions have spotted emanating from its surface. Callisto may also harbor an ocean beneath its surface — though there is less evidence of this — so Juice will study it in more detail as well. Finally, Ganymede is of great interest because it is the only known moon in the solar system to have its own magnetosphere. Juice will orbit Ganymede to discover more, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit the moon of another planet.