Juice engineering model arrives at ESA mission control

Special delivery!

Our Juice spacecraft is well on its way to Jupiter but its ‘twin’ recently completed a special journey of its own and has arrived at its new home at ESA’s ESOC mission operations centre.

Juice is flown from the building next to this one. From there, the flight control team send commands, download data and status information and generally look after the spacecraft during its voyage through the cold dark of interplanetary space.

But with Juice so far from home, troubleshooting any issues the spacecraft encounters on the way can be a real challenge. Like other far-away missions such as BepiColombo and Euclid, the Juice team relies on a realistic, one-of-a-kind model of the spacecraft to diagnose and solve these problems.

The Juice engineering model is a faithful copy of the spacecraft’s systems – hardware, software and scientific instruments – as well as other systems that mimic the solar arrays that generate Juice’s electrical power, and even the ground stations with which it communicates.

It’s a safe place to test routine and emergency procedures and trial new software before it’s executed on the flight model millions of kilometres away.

The Juice model proved vital just after launch, as teams set to work solving the RIME antenna deployment mystery. It will also be used to help plan the complex spacecraft operations involved in this summer’s first-ever lunar-Earth gravity assist.

The roughly three-tonne Juice model was delivered to ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany, by road from the spacecraft’s manufacturer, Airbus in Toulouse, France, on a heavy-load transport vehicle in February 2024.

It has since been unpacked and installed in its new home – a dedicated, climate-controlled facility at ESOC.

The flight control team received training on the use and maintenance of the model before it was officially handed over from Airbus to ESA on 4 April – almost exactly one year after Juice’s flight model took off on its mission to investigate Jupiter’s mysterious icy moons.