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During the wee hours of this morning (Aug. 31), a boxy spacecraft with photo voltaic wings within the form of crosses flew proper by Venus — if all went in line with plan.
That probe is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUICE (“Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer”), which is on its technique to just do what you would possibly anticipate after listening to its identify.
The final objective is certainly for JUICE to check our solar system‘s creamsicle-colored gas giant, but also to gather data about three of the planet’s largest moons — Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. These three moons are believed to harbor oceans under their icy crusts, meaning they could be solid leads in astronomers’ quest to find life beyond Earth. Europa in particular is a high-profile suspect for that agenda.
But if you’re familiar with the arrangement of our solar system’s planets, you may wonder why JUICE flew by Venus on its way to Jupiter — that’s technically the wrong direction. The simple explanation is that JUICE can’t really take a straight-line route to its destination. Rather, it’s hopping around the gravitational tides of different worlds — it recently flew by the moon and then Earth again, for instance — as part of a larger, fuel-efficient effort to slingshot itself to the Jovian system.
Unfortunately for the public, JUICE operators had to turn off the spacecraft’s sensors during the probe’s Venus flyby because of the intense heat of the amber-hued planet’s environment. What does that mean? No images.
In fact, according to a statement revealed by ESA on Aug. 25, JUICE even used its most important, high-gain antenna as a “thermal shield” throughout as we speak’s encounter. That flyby peaked with a scheduled closest method to Venus at 1:28 a.m. EST (0528 GMT) as we speak.
The flyby comes after JUICE introduced mission operators with a little bit of a problem in July, because the spacecraft stopped speaking details about its well being and telemetry. Twenty hours of troubleshooting later, nonetheless, the group was capable of finding the robotic explorer’s voice as soon as once more, and all was effectively.
The subsequent cease for the almost 13,300-pound (6,000-kilogram) probe will likely be Earth but once more.
“JUICE will use the gravity of Venus this week to bend its orbit around the sun and gain speed relative to Earth without using fuel,” ESA wrote within the Aug. 25 assertion. “JUICE will use the Earth flyby in 2026 to further fine-tune its trajectory.”
From there, the probe will conduct another orbit across the solar, the group defined, earlier than returning to (you guessed it) Earth a ultimate time in January 2029. Only then can it begin interested by the end result of its journey. It ought to settle in orbit round Jupiter in July 2031.
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