Juice successfully completes its 2nd fly-by of Earth
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The European probe Juice yesterday successfully completed its second fly-by of Earth, on its way to Jupiter in July 2031.
The flyby deflected Juice by an angle of 20° compared to its pre-flyby path and increased its velocity by 3.5 km/s. In the four weeks before the flyby, spacecraft operators only had to give Juice one tiny nudge (out of six opportunities set aside) to put it on exactly the right approach trajectory to make the most of Earth’s gravity. They have been tracking the spacecraft extra carefully since 17 August, and will continue to do so until 10 October.
Juice’s closest approach was at 13:45 CEST (11:45 UTC) on 28 September. As Juice flew just 8640 km above the Indian Ocean, it snapped a series of images with its onboard monitoring cameras.
The spacecraft’s name is an acronym for “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer”. Its goal is to study the three large moons of Jupiter (Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede) that are thought to be ice covered and might even have underground oceans. While it took a nice picture of the Moon in this fly-by, I think the picture taken by Juno of Ganymede is more appropriate, as it gives us a foretaste of what to expect. It was taken in May 2023.
Juice has already done one previous fly-by of Earth and one of Venus. It still has to do another Earth fly-by in January 2029 before it finally heads to Jupiter.
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Next gravity assist of note: Europa Clipper will swing by Earth on December 3, just 9 weeks from now. After which, next stop: Jupiter.
It will get there sooner than JUICE, because an expendable Falcon Heavy delivers a lot more delta-v than an Ariane 5.
“… an expendable Falcon Heavy delivers a lot more delta-v than an Ariane 5.”
Indeed it does! Technically we should qualify that as a fully expended Falcon Heavy, since Heavies always expend their center cores, typically ones that have earned their retirement with multiple flights. The highest performance missions (whether of mass or velocity) often require expenditure of all three F9 cores.
The recent Roman Space Telescope, currently in transit to its L2-centric operating position, expended three first-timer cores, however. This is de rigueur for NASA heavy planetary missions such as Psyche and Europa Clipper.