Juice’s RIME Antenna Gets Detached

After a nail-biting three weeks, the Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna on the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has finally been successfully deployed. The 16-metre-long boom had been stuck in its mounting bracket due to a tiny pin jamming the other segments in place during the first attempt to extend it. However, the flight control teams at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt were determined to find a solution. They tried shaking Juice using its thrusters and warming it with sunlight, but it was not until they fired a mechanical device called a ‘non-explosive actuator’ (NEA) located in the jammed bracket that the antenna finally unfolded. RIME will now be used to study the surface and subsurface structure of Jupiter’s icy moons down to a depth of 9 km, as part of Juice’s mission to investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants and the formation of our Solar System.