Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer
mission of the European Space Agency to explore Jupiter’s moons
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice, formerly JUICE) is an interplanetary spacecraft developed by the European Space Agency (ESA). It is on its way to orbit and study three icy moons of Jupiter: Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. These planetary-mass moons are targets for study because they are thought to have significant bodies of liquid water beneath their frozen surfaces, which would make them potentially habitable for extraterrestrial life.
Juice is the first interplanetary spacecraft to the outer Solar System planets not launched by the United States and the first intended to orbit a moon other than Earth's Moon. Launched by ESA, from Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana on 14 April 2023, with Airbus Defence and Space as the main contractor, it is expected to reach Jupiter in July 2031 after four gravity assists and eight years of travel. In December 2034, the spacecraft will enter orbit around Ganymede for its close-up science mission. Its period of operations will overlap with NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which was launched in October 2024.
Background
The mission started as a reformulation of the Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter proposal, which was to be ESA's component of the cancelled Europa Jupiter System Mission – Laplace (EJSM-Laplace). It became a candidate for the first L-class (Large) mission (L1) of the ESA Cosmic Vision Programme, and its selection was announced on 2 May 2012.
In April 2012, Juice was recommended over the proposed X-ray telescope ATHENA and the gravitational wave observatory LISA (under the older name NGO).
The public source identifies “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer” as mission of the European Space Agency to explore Jupiter’s moons. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Jupiter, Moons and Explorer.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.