Galileo plaque unveiled on Juice spacecraft

A commemorative plaque celebrating Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s moons was unveiled on ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, on 20 January 2023. The spacecraft had just completed its final tests before departing Airbus Toulouse, France for Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana to count down to an April launch.

The plaque features imagery of Galileo Galilei's first observations of Jupiter and its moons from a copy of the Sidereus Nuncius hosted in the library of the Astronomical and Copernican Museum, at the headquarters of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Rome, Italy. The copy is one of the first 550 ever printed in 1610 in Venice.

The image shows the plaque being fixed to the Juice spacecraft. It is printed on a piece of MLI (multi-layered insulation) that makes up the thermal 'blanket' wrapped around the spacecraft to keep its internal temperatures stable.