JUICE TAKES FLIGHT

Set to launch this month, the European-led JUICE spacecraft will explore the frozen worlds orbiting the gas giant Jupiter.

- Will Gater

This month ESA's JUICE mission is due to thunder into the skies, carried aloft by a mighty Ariane 5 rocket. As the venerable European launcher soars above the palm trees around the spaceport in French Guiana, JUICE - the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer - will be some eight years from its final destination: Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, and its enigmatic collection of satellites.

Through a series of fly-bys of both Earth and Venus, the mission will slingshot its way across the Solar System, crossing the gulf between our world and the Jovian system to arrive there in the summer of 2031. It's a voyage only a small number of spacecraft have ever achieved. Once at Jupiter, JUICE will swoop past the three icy moons Callisto, Ganymede and Europa multiple times, before settling into orbit around Ganymede in 2034. For those working on JUICE, it will be a chance to dive deep into the secrets of worlds whose mystery has only grown the more humanity has learnt about them.

Professor Michele Dougherty, a planetary scientist based at Imperial College London, is one of many researchers eager to explore the Jovian system. Her involvement in JUICE has been a long one, stretching back some 15 years to the early planning days, when it was going to be a joint US and European project. Now Dougherty is the lead scientist on the magnetometer that JUICE will carry with it to Jupiter. This instrument, built here in the UK, will examine the magnetic fields of the moons Callisto, Ganymede and Europa in unprecedented detail. And indeed it is those fields, or rather what they hint at, that are one of the biggest draws to exploring these icy worlds.