ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has encountered a setback in its mission to investigate the outer Solar System. The 16-metre-long Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna, which is designed to penetrate ice and study the surface and subsurface structure of Jupiter’s icy moons, has not yet been deployed due to an issue with its mounting bracket. Despite the setback, teams at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, along with partners in science and industry, are working tirelessly to free the radar. The current leading hypothesis is that a tiny stuck pin is preventing the antenna’s release, and various options are being considered to nudge the instrument out of its current position. With two months of planned commissioning remaining, there is still plenty of time for teams to resolve the issue and continue work on the rest of the powerful suite of instruments on board Juice. The RIME instrument is one of ten on board Juice, which is set to investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants and the formation of our Solar System.
