How Juice spacecraft is changing space around it

A spacecraft in flight cannot help but change the space about it – which can pose problems. A new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research Space Physics presents a study on how ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, is interacting with the solar wind. This illustration of the impact of the spacecraft-environment interaction shows how a dense cloud of electrons are formed in front of Juice, but an incoming ion is repelled away from the spacecraft since the spacecraft is positively charged. An ion wake is observed behind Juice while the electric potential around the spacecraft is asymmetric in nature.