During the wee hours of this morning (Aug. 31), a boxy spacecraft with solar wings in the shape of crosses flew right by Venus — if all went according to plan.
That probe is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUICE (“Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer”), which is on its way to do just what you might expect after hearing its name.
The ultimate goal is indeed for JUICE to study our solar system‘s creamsicle-colored gas giant, but also to gather data about three of the planet’s largest moons — Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. These three moons are believed to harbor oceans under their icy crusts, meaning they could be solid leads in astronomers’ quest to find life beyond Earth. Europa in particular is a high-profile suspect for that agenda.
But if you’re familiar with the arrangement of our solar system’s planets, you may wonder why JUICE flew by Venus on its way to Jupiter — that’s technically the wrong direction. The simple explanation is that JUICE can’t really take a straight-line route to its destination. Rather, it’s hopping around the gravitational tides of different worlds — it recently flew by the moon and then Earth again, for instance — as part of a larger, fuel-efficient effort to slingshot itself to the Jovian system.
Unfortunately for the public, JUICE operators had to turn off the spacecraft’s sensors during the probe’s Venus flyby because of the intense heat of the amber-hued planet’s environment. What does that mean? No images.
In fact, according to a statement published by ESA on Aug. 25, JUICE even used its main, high-gain antenna as a “thermal shield” during today’s encounter. That flyby peaked with a scheduled closest approach to Venus at 1:28 a.m. EST (0528 GMT) today.
The flyby comes after JUICE presented mission operators with a bit of a challenge in July, as the spacecraft stopped communicating information about its health and telemetry. Twenty hours of troubleshooting later, however, the team was able to find the robotic explorer’s voice once again, and all was well.
The next stop for the nearly 13,300-pound (6,000-kilogram) probe will be Earth yet again.
“JUICE will use the gravity of Venus this week to bend its orbit around the sun and gain speed relative to Earth without using fuel,” ESA wrote in the Aug. 25 statement. “JUICE will use the Earth flyby in 2026 to further fine-tune its trajectory.”
From there, the probe will conduct one more orbit around the sun, the team explained, before returning to (you guessed it) Earth a final time in January 2029. Only then can it start thinking about the culmination of its journey. It should settle in orbit around Jupiter in July 2031.
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