Juice Deployments Successfully Completed: Finalizing Jupiter’s Form

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has completed its final deployments, including the swinging out and locking into place of the probes and antennas that make up Juice’s Radio and Plasma Wave Investigation (RPWI). The RPWI will be the first ever device to generate a 3D map of the electric fields around Jupiter, providing valuable information on how energy is transferred between Jupiter’s enormous rotating magnetosphere and the large icy moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. The instrument package will collect data that helps answer questions such as what Jupiter’s ocean worlds are like, why Ganymede is so unique, could there be life in the Jupiter system, and how has Jupiter’s complex environment shaped its moons. Juice will carry out the world’s first ever lunar-Earth gravity assist in August 2024.