Juice - JUpiter ICy moons Explorer

Exploring the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants

 

Welcome to ESA's website for the Juice scientific community. The target audience for this site is scientist and engineers involved in the Juice mission as well as the general public. ESA pages for the general public interested in the Juice mission can also be found here  .

JUICE - JUpiter ICy moons Explorer - is the first large-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme. The mission was launched on 14 April 2023 and will arrive at Jupiter in July 2031, it will spend at least four years making detailed observations of the giant gaseous planet Jupiter and three of its largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.

 

Interested in joining the JUICE community? Explore the job opportunities here .

If you have any requests as documents / job opportunities / papers to submit to be added to the environment you can do so here .

 

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The science of Juice

The Spacecraft

Workshop Slides

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The Data of Juice

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Details about the objectives of Juice and its targets. Technical details of the Juice spacecraft. List of the meeting and workshop slides related to the Juice mission and its science. List of the baseline papers to understand Jupiter and its moons. Data collected by the different instruments of Juice. Discover Juice from another point of view.

 

 

The Latest News of the Juice Mission

Stay up to date with the latest Juice news.

 

Back Will Juice flyby an asteroid during its cruise?

Will JUICE flyby an asteroid during its cruise?

 

The discussion took place with the Juice scientists and the ESA project in the second half of 2023. Given the excellent Juice launch performances, it was legitimate to discuss a possible asteroid flyby during the cruise phase.

Even if an asteroid flyby is not an immediate milestone (most likely to take place in 2029), a decision was preferably to be made early for two reasons: first, such a flyby is not in the mission baseline and would need a significant amount of preparation; secondly, the next update of the nominal trajectory requires the best knowledge of the propellant status to study various options.

Preliminary mission analysis and publications from the scientific community gave some indication of the possible flyby opportunities. 

An asteroid flyby was obviously of strong interest for the remote sensing instrument teams (MAJIS and JANUS). A compelling target was the asteroid 223 Rosa. However, preliminary analysis indicated that its flyby would require significant propellant usage, which is equivalent to the manoeuvre to reach the 200 km orbit at Ganymede. Much smaller objects requiring less propellant usage (10 m/s) were identified, but not characterized in details yet.

Eventually, the scientists and the project decided to not implement an asteroid flyby, to keep all propellant margins to improve the science return of the nominal mission, for a potential mission extension and for safety.


​​​​Olivier Witasse, 11 June 2024