Monday, February 25, 2013

JUICE mission to Jupiter


The Juno Jovian Observatory:
http://herrero-radio-astronomy.blogspot.com/search/label/Juno
will fly by the Earth September 10 this year, to gain energy and continue its journey to Jupiter, arriving in 2016.

I look forward to this wonderful mission !

There is more to come:

"...NASA has selected key contributions to a 2022 European Space Agency (ESA) mission that will study Jupiter and three of its largest moons in unprecedented detail. The moons are thought to harbor vast water oceans beneath their icy surfaces... Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will be the U.S. lead for the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration experiment. The radar experiment's principal investigator is Lorenzo Bruzzone of Universita degli Studi di Trento in Italy.

Under the lead of Bruzzone and the Italian Space Agency, JPL will provide the transmitter and receiver hardware for a radar sounder designed to penetrate the icy crust of Jupiter's moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto to a depth of about 5 miles (9 kilometers). This will allow scientists to see for the first time the underground structure of these tectonically complex and unique icy worlds..."
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-069