The making of Juice – episode 10.3
ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) was developed, constructed and tested at different sites across Europe. ‘The making of Juice’ series takes the viewer behind the scenes of the European space industry and planetary science community involved in the mission.
Juice carries a state-of-the-art science payload made up of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments. This episode focuses on the geophysical instruments, which will explore the moons’ surfaces and subsurfaces, probe the atmospheres of Jupiter and its moons, and measure their gravity fields.
The Ganymede Laser Altimeter (GALA) will study the tidal deformation of Ganymede and the surface terrain of the icy moons. The Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME), is an ice-penetrating radar designed to explore the subsurface structure of the icy moons down to a depth of around 9 km. The Gravity & Geophysics of Jupiter and Galilean Moons (3GM) is a radio package that will measure the gravity field at Ganymede, the extent of the internal oceans on the icy moons, and the structure of the neutral atmosphere and ionosphere of Jupiter and its moons.
The mission will also carry out a Planetary Radio Interferometer & Doppler Experiment (PRIDE), which will use the standard telecommunication system of the spacecraft, together with radio telescopes on Earth to perform precise measurements of the spacecraft position and velocity to investigate the gravity fields of Jupiter and the icy moons.
The documentary includes interviews with (in order of appearance): Olivier Grasset, Juice interdisciplinary scientist; Luciano Iess, 3GM principal investigator; Hauke Hussmann, GALA principal investigator; Lorenzo Bruzzone, RIME principal investigator; Leonid Gurvits, PRIDE principal investigator.
November 2023 update: This episode is part of a film project that culminated in a two-hour documentary film released in November 2023.
Access the other episodes of ‘The making of Juice’
Credit: ESA/Lightcurve Films, original music by William Zeitler
