Despite its later launch date, its more powerful launch vehicle will allow Clipper to reach Jupiter earlier, more than a year before JUICE, in April 2030. “It’s much reduced,” Prockter says, although she estimates about 70 percent of the originally planned joint science will still be possible.Ĭlipper will launch in fall 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The international collaboration was reborn, albeit in watered-down fashion. project eventually became Europa Clipper, named for the “clipper” merchant ships of the 19th century. Initially called the Europa Multiple Flyby Mission, the U.S. Redemption came in 2013, when NASA’s efforts to explore Europa received renewed support and funding from Congress. “These things happen,” says Michele Dougherty at Imperial College London, who worked on the European side of EJSM. “That killed the Europa part.” The situation was disappointing, but not wholly unexpected. (A NASA spacecraft, Juno, is presently operational at Jupiter, but is more focused on the gas giant planet than on any of its moons.) “We didn’t have the money,” says Louise Prockter at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in Maryland, part of the U.S. Funding issues in the U.S., however, led NASA to pull the plug on EJSM in the early 2010s, leaving Europe flying solo. This collaborative effort called for Europe to build a Ganymede-focused spacecraft, while NASA would construct a probe for Europa. The concept that would ultimately become JUICE emerged in 2008, as part of a joint venture with NASA dubbed the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM). “We’re trying to characterize what the habitability of Ganymede might be,” says Emma Bunce at the University of Leicester in England, part of the JUICE team.ĮSA isn’t the only space agency with Jupiter in its sights, of course-although recent history would almost suggest otherwise. After its initial reconnaissance, the spacecraft will enter orbit there in 2034. Ganymede-the solar system’s largest moon-will receive most of JUICE’s attention, however. On its arrival in July 2031, the solar-powered spacecraft will focus its 10 science instruments on three of the four largest Jovian moons-Europa, Ganymede and Callisto-all thought to harbor subsurface oceans. JUICE will take eight years to reach Jupiter, saving fuel along the way by using gravitational assists from Earth, Venus and Mars. Now undergoing testing in France, the six-ton spacecraft will soon be shipped to French Guiana in South America for its launch this April on a European Ariane 5 rocket. The mission to visit our solar system’s largest planet will be ESA’s JUICE spacecraft-the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. “When we look out in the solar system, places that have water in the present day are really restricted to Earth, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.” That latter planet and its satellites, studied in detail by NASA and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cassini-Huygens mission from 2004 to 2017, still holds secrets that scientists will one day probe. “What we’ve learned on Earth is where you find water, you quite often find life,” says Mark Fox-Powell from the Open University in England. Scientists believe vast oceans lurk within, kept liquid by the jostling from Jupiter’s immense gravitational field and protected from the planet’s harsh radiation belts by thick ice sheets. If life exists elsewhere in our solar system, Jupiter’s large icy moons are a pretty good bet on where to find it.
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