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Ariane 5 Flight VA260, Juice: Fully Integrated And Ready For Rollout

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
ESA
April 11, 2023
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Ariane 5 Flight VA260, Juice: Fully Integrated And Ready For Rollout
Ariane 5 Flight VA260
ESA

Ariane 5 for flight VA260 carrying ESA’s Juice mission is seen here fully integrated and ready for rollout for its planned 13 April 2023 launch from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

Juice – JUpiter ICy Moons Explorer – is humankind’s next bold mission to the outer Solar System. After an eight-year journey to Jupiter, it will make detailed observations of the gas giant and its three large ocean-bearing moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.

This ambitious mission will characterise these moons with a powerful suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments to discover more about these compelling destinations as potential habitats for past or present life.

Juice will monitor Jupiter’s complex magnetic, radiation and plasma environment in depth and its interplay with the moons, studying the Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giant systems across the Universe.

SpaceRef co-founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.