The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
This is a still from a cinematic animation. Click here to view the animation in full.
Since our ancient ancestors looked up at the skies and saw the brilliant white dot that is Jupiter, we have come a long way in understanding this enormous ball of gas and its menagerie of moons. We have used rudimentary telescopes, high-tech modern telescopes, and space telescopes, the first probes have even passed by for an initial look, but we have never sent a spacecraft to explore the moons close up. ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, is here to change the game.
Juice will make detailed observations of the giant gas planet and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa – with a suite of instruments. By making flybys of these moons at distances of just a few hundred kilometres, and even going into orbit around Ganymede, Juice will characterise them as both planetary objects and possible habitats. The mission will also explore Jupiter’s complex environment in depth, and study the wider Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giants across the Universe.
Shown in this video is Jupiter and its giant moon Ganymede – Juice’s primary target, the largest moon in the Solar System, and the only one to generate its own magnetic field.
After arrival in the Jovian system in 2031, Juice will perform five Ganymede flybys to reduce its orbital energy so that it can effectively explore Jupiter; whilst in this ‘Jupiter orbit’ phase of the mission, it will make further flybys to carry out scientific observations, before later transferring from orbit around Jupiter to orbit around Ganymede, becoming the first spacecraft ever to orbit a moon other than our own, and beginning its investigations of the moon in earnest in late 2034. Juice will end its mission by colliding with Ganymede’s surface in 2035.