The deployment of Juice’s ice-penetrating RIME antenna has hit a snag during its first week of commissioning. The 16-metre-long Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna is currently stuck in its mounting bracket, preventing it from being released. Teams at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, along with partners in science and industry, are working to free the radar. The current leading hypothesis is that a tiny stuck pin is preventing the antenna’s release, and just a matter of millimetres could make the difference to set the rest of the radar free. Various options are still available to nudge the important instrument out of its current position, including an engine burn to shake the spacecraft followed by a series of rotations that will turn Juice, warming up the mount and radar, which are currently in the cold shadows. The RIME instrument is an ice-penetrating radar designed to study the surface and subsurface structure of Jupiter’s icy moons down to a depth of 9 km. It is one of ten instruments on board ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, set to investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants and the formation of our Solar System.
