After three weeks of deployment, the Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has finally been released from its mounting bracket. During the first attempt at stretching out the 16-meter-long boom, only the initial segments of each half were released. Flight controllers theorized that a stuck pin prevented the other segments from unfurling. The flight control teams at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt attempted to dislodge the pin by oscillating Juice using its thrusters and warming it with sunlight. On May 12, RIME was finally coaxed into action when the flight control team triggered a mechanical device known as a ‘non-explosive actuator’ (NEA), situated in the jammed bracket. This produced a jolt that shifted the pin by a few millimeters, enabling the antenna to extend. Once Juice reaches Jupiter, it will utilize RIME to examine the surface and subsurface structure of Jupiter’s icy moons down to a depth of 9 km. RIME is one of ten instruments onboard Juice poised to explore the genesis of habitable worlds around gas giants and the formation of our Solar System.
