by The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is heading back to Earth — for the time being, anyway.
On Nov. 17, JUICE performed a 43-minute burn to get into position for its upcoming Earth-moon flyby, the first-ever double gravity assist of the two celestial bodies.
It was the spacecraft's largest maneuver so far. "This maneuver used up roughly 363 kilograms [800 pounds] of fuel – or almost exactly 10% of the 3,650 kilograms [8,047 pounds] of fuel that JUICE launched with," Julia Schwartz, Flight Dynamics Engineer at ESA’s ESOC mission control center in Germany, said in a statement.
The spacecraft launched from French Guiana on April 23, 2023, and is ultimately bound for Jupiter to study the planet and three of its icy, potentially oceanic, moons: Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.
But in order to get there, it needs to perform a series of gravity assists, flying past the planets of the inner solar system and using their gravitational tides to slingshot itself toward its target — a technique that saves overall fuel.
Source
On Nov. 17, JUICE performed a 43-minute burn to get into position for its upcoming Earth-moon flyby, the first-ever double gravity assist of the two celestial bodies.
It was the spacecraft's largest maneuver so far. "This maneuver used up roughly 363 kilograms [800 pounds] of fuel – or almost exactly 10% of the 3,650 kilograms [8,047 pounds] of fuel that JUICE launched with," Julia Schwartz, Flight Dynamics Engineer at ESA’s ESOC mission control center in Germany, said in a statement.
The spacecraft launched from French Guiana on April 23, 2023, and is ultimately bound for Jupiter to study the planet and three of its icy, potentially oceanic, moons: Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.
But in order to get there, it needs to perform a series of gravity assists, flying past the planets of the inner solar system and using their gravitational tides to slingshot itself toward its target — a technique that saves overall fuel.
Source
