ESA selects mission to Jupiter and its icy moons

JUICE is name of mission


Jupiter Mission Announced by ESA to Study Possibilites of Life - as part of the news and politics series by GeoBeats.

Did you know Jupiter was called a wandering star in prehistoric times?

Today, we know relatively more about Jupiter and its moons but still our knowledge is very limited. On May 2nd, 2012, the European Space Agency announced its plans for a 2022 mission to explore Jupiter and its icy moons.

Dubbed, JUICE , it will reach its destination by 2030 - about 8 years from its takeoff in 2022. The mission will cost around 1 billion euros and will be the first european-led mission of its kind to venture to the outer solar system.

Using cameras, spectrometers and an ice-penetrating radar, the mission's purpose is to explore Jupiter's moons and study the surface and oceans for possible habitable conditions.

There's particular interest in Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. It is believed to have an ocean underneath its icy surface and its own magnetic field.

Until Galileo concluded in 1610 that objects orbiting Jupiter were its moons, they were considered to be stars. And that discovery was the first example of objects not revolving around Earth - in support of the revolutionary theory at that time by Copernicus that the Earth was not the center of Universe.

Jupiter itself has always been a source of fascination. Dubbed, the King of the Gods in ancient Roman mythology, it's mass is 318 times that of Earth. It has the great red spot - a storm that has been going on for the last 200 years and the area of the storm is massive enough include 3 planets as large as Earth.

The Plan

A proposed timeline is launch in 2022 on an Ariane 5 carrier rocket, and arrival at the Jupiter system in 2030. By 2033 the spacecraft should enter orbit around Ganymede, after completing various maneuvers around Jupiter and the other moons. Proposed instruments could include cameras, spectrometers, and radar.

Targets

Ganymede
Image of Ganymede's anti-Jovian hemisphere taken by the Galileo probe. Lighter surfaces, such as in recent impacts, grooved terrain and the whitish north polar cap at upper right, are enriched in water ice.


Callisto
Bright scars on a darker surface testify to a long history of impacts on Jupiter's moon Callisto in this image of Callisto from NASA's Galileo spacecraft. The picture, taken in May 2001, is the only complete global color image of Callisto obtained by Galileo, which has been orbiting Jupiter since December 1995. Of Jupiter's four largest moons, Callisto orbits farthest from the giant planet. Callisto's surface is uniformly cratered but is not uniform in color or brightness. Scientists believe the brighter areas are mainly ice and the darker areas are highly eroded, ice-poor material. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.


Europa
View of Europa taken from a range of 2,869,252 kilometers (1.6 million miles) on March 2 at 2:00 PM. The color composite is made from three black and white images taken through the orange, green and violet filters. The 170 longitude is at the center of the picture; this is the face away from Jupiter. Irregular dark and bright patches on the surface are different from the patterns on the other satellites of Jupiter and those on the Moon, Mars and Mercury. Dark intersecting lines may be faults that break the crust. JPL manages and controls the Voyager Project for NASA's Office of Space Science.