The European Space Agency’s JUICE probe launched in April this yr
ESA/Stephane Corvaja
DECADES-LONG area missions are deliberate all the way down to the second. The precise routes the craft journey by means of the photo voltaic system are meticulously mapped out, based mostly on years of design and testing. If you wish to deviate from these, you had higher have a compelling purpose.
But that’s exactly what occurred in 2005, throughout NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn. Upon seeing one thing uncommon, Michele Dougherty, a physicist at Imperial College London, requested for a better look at considered one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus. What the probe noticed was unbelievable: large plumes of water vapour erupting from cracks on the moon’s south pole.
Today, with Cassini lengthy gone, Dougherty is trying ahead to creating additional uncommon discoveries, because the principal investigator on the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). This challenge, which launched in April, has a transparent aim: to higher perceive whether or not Jupiter’s moons have the appropriate elements to harbour life.
Jupiter has between 80 and 95 moons, however JUICE will focus on three of its 4 largest. It will fly by Europa, Ganymede – the biggest moon within the photo voltaic system – and Callisto, earlier than going into orbit round Ganymede.
Michele Dougherty
Nabil Nezzar
Dougherty tells New Scientist why we must be open to the sudden secrets and techniques that might lurk beneath the icy exteriors of those worlds and the way she plans to disclose them.
Becca Caddy: How did it really feel to vary the course …