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POLITIKOFF

Space mission to Jupiter's icy moons postponed, mission aims to study oceans

Politiko 2023-04-13 19:04:43

Space mission to Jupiter's icy moons postponed, mission aims to study

The European Space Agency (ESA) has postponed a planned launch of a satellite to the planet Jupiter. Weather conditions indicated there was a risk of lightning on the mission, which aims to determine whether the planet's moons might be suitable for life.

ESA says it will try to launch the rocket again on Friday. The eight-year journey from Earth to reach Jupiter's main moons is one of the organization's most ambitious missions ever. There is evidence that these icy worlds of the moons – Callisto, Europa and Ganymede – harbor liquid water oceans in the depths. The project is known as the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice for short. Juice could help determine whether conditions in the moon's hidden oceans have at least a chance of supporting simple microbial organisms.

"In every extreme environment on Earth, whether it's high acidity, high radioactivity, low temperature, high temperature - we find microbial life in some form," Prof Carole Mundell, director of science at Esa, told BBC News. The €1.6 billion mission was scheduled to lift off Thursday on an Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, at 09:15 local time.

"Arian" does not have the energy to send "Juice" directly to Jupiter. It will send the spacecraft around the inner solar system. A series of flybys of Venus and Earth will then gravitationally carry the mission to its intended destination.

Arrival in the Jovian system is expected in July 2031. Juice will make 35 close passes of the moons – coming within 400 km of their surfaces on occasion – before settling into orbit around Ganymede. The spacecraft carries a total of 10 instruments. It has various cameras, particle detectors, a radar to map features below the surface; there is also a lidar, which is used to make 3D maps of the surface terrain. But it is the magnetometer provided by the UK that may provide some of the most impactful data. The experiment built by Imperial College London will tell us about the properties of the moons' hidden oceans. And on Ganymede, in particular, the information should be quite detailed.

"We will know the depth of the ocean, its salt content, how deep the crust is above the ocean and whether the ocean is in contact with the rocky mantle. "So we will understand the internal structure of the moon, and from observations from other instruments looking at the surface, we will be able to work out whether there is organic material on that surface," explained Prof Michele Dougherty, principal investigator of the Imperial magnetometer. .