O launch from the ESA space base in Kourou, French Guiana, where Portugal will be represented by the president of the space agency Portugal Space, Ricardo Conde, will take place at 13:15 (Lisbon time) aboard a European rocket Ariane 5 .
The mission, which was due to be launched in 2022, has Bruno Sousa as director of flight operations and the satellite includes components manufactured by LusoSpace, Active Space Technologies, Deimos Engenharia and FHP – Frezite High Performance and an instrument designed in part by LIP – Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics.
JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, Explorer of the Icy Moons of Jupiter) will study the largest planet in the Solar System and the moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, where scientists believe that liquid water may exist (a fundamental element for life as we know it ) under the surface ice crusts.
The satellite should reach the gaseous ‘giant’ after eight years, in July 2031, make 35 close flights to the icy moons and reach Ganymede in December 2034.
It will be the first time that an artificial satellite will orbit a moon of another planet.
It is expected that the ESA mission, which cost around 1.6 billion euros and had the collaboration of the North American (NASA), Japanese (JAXA) and Israeli (ISA) space agencies in terms of instrumentation and ‘hardware’ ‘, ends in September 2035.
The first scientific data are expected in 2032.
Jupiter is 11 times the size of Earth and is mostly gas, like the Sun. Ganymede is the largest of the Solar System’s moons and has a large ocean beneath its surface.
The ESA mission was designed to find out if there are sites around Jupiter and inside the icy moons with the necessary conditions (water, energy, stability and biological elements) to support life.
Deimos Engenharia had the task of guaranteeing that the satellite would not reach “under any circumstances” neither the planet Mars nor the moon Europa, which are, as the company explained to Lusa, in the “category of maximum planetary protection for extraterrestrial bodies”, which can “potentially harbor life”.
On the other hand, the company’s work “consisted of improving the mission’s basic autonomous navigation strategy during the Europa flyby and during the orbital phase of Ganymede”.
One of the various instruments carried by the satellite is a radiation monitor developed by LIP and Efacec, in cooperation with the Norwegian company Ideas and the Swiss research institute Paul Scherrer.
Researcher Paula Gonçalves, who coordinated the project at LIP, explained to Lusa that the instrument “serves to measure the ionizing radiation environment” to which the satellite will be subject during its trajectory, “being able to send warning signals so that protect the satellite’s other detectors and systems.
The radiation monitor, being an energetic particle detector, “also allows scientific measurements and complements the measurements of other instruments” on board the satellite.
LIP was also in charge of an ESA project of irradiation tests of electronic components that make up the satellite, in order to ensure that they were prepared to “survive the high doses of radiation expected in Jupiter’s magnetosphere”.
Another of JUICE’s instruments is a magnetometer, a device that, in this case, will characterize the intense magnetic field of Jupiter and its interaction with that of the moon Ganymede.
LusoSpace has developed a coil which, as the company’s chief executive, Ivo Yves Vieira, told Lusa, generates a magnetic field “which will be a reference for the measuring instrument of Jupiter’s magnetic field”.
In addition to shields that protect sensitive electronic components from high radiation, solar panels for power supply and an insulating layer against extreme temperatures, the satellite has an antenna to send data to Earth and a computer to solve some problems. independently.
The antenna has a coating produced by the Porto company FHP and its operating mechanism was developed by Active Space Technologies, based in Coimbra.
The JUICE satellite will be the last mission sent by ESA from French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, which will be replaced by the Ariane 6 model.
Currently, the only artificial satellite orbiting Jupiter is NASA’s Juno.
Portugal has been an ESA Member State since 2000.
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