Celebrating RPWI deployment

In the six weeks since Juice began its journey, the Flight Control Team deployed all the solar panels, antennas, probes and booms that were tucked away safely during launch. The last step involved swinging out and locking into place of the probes and antennas that make up Juice’s Radio & Plasma Wave Investigation (RPWI). In this photo, the mission operators celebrate the successful deployment of the RPWI instrument.

Juice’s antennas and booms each carry part or all of some of Juice’s 10 instruments. By placing them far from Juice, the instruments that need to be separated from the spacecraft’s own electric and magnetic fields are kept at a distance.

This powerful instrument package will collect data that helps us answer questions like: What are Jupiter’s ocean worlds like? Why is Ganymede so unique? Could there be – or ever have been – life in the Jupiter system? How has Jupiter’s complex environment shaped its moons, and vice versa? What is a typical gas giant planet like – how did it form, and how does it work?

Accompanying views from the Juice monitoring cameras, confirmation that everything deployed as planned also came from the instruments themselves.