Europe’s JUICE Mission Will Answer These Five Mysteries About Jupiter

One of the biggest questions that JUICE aims to answer is whether there was ever life on any of Jupiter’s moons, and whether they could be habitable to microbial life. All three of the moons that JUICE will visit could be potential habitats for life, and Juice has been designed to study whether there ever was or could ever be life there (via ESA).

JUICE will have a suite of ten instruments to help it study these environments, including an optical camera, several spectrographs, altimeters, radar, gravity measuring instruments, and more. As well as these issues, two more questions JUICE hopes to answer is how Jupiter’s environment has shaped its moons, and how the moons have shaped the planet. Related to this, the mission will also investigate how gas giants like Jupiter form.

There are many aspects of the formation of the solar system that we don’t yet understand, and Jupiter is an ideal test laboratory for these questions because of its many moons. By studying the moons, researchers hope to learn more about what conditions were necessary for a planet to form (via ESA).

The JUICE mission is scheduled to launch between 5 April and 25 April 2023 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. It will travel out into the solar system and perform a series of flybys of various planets before arriving at Jupiter in 2031, where it will study both the planet and its moons until 2035.