ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) deep space probe is heading for Jupiter and has sent back its first selfie. A new image captured by the Juice Surveillance Camera 1 (JMC1) on the front of the spacecraft shows Earth and Juice’s deployed solar array.
Juice will begin its eight-year voyage to Jupiter on April 14, 2023 at 2:14 PM CET (12:14 GMT), and will land in the European Guiana Space Station in Kourou, French Guiana. We took off with an Ariane 5 rocket from the center. After making flybys of Earth, the Moon, and Venus and gaining enough speed to reach its destination in 2031, the solar-powered rover will fly to Jupiter’s moons before entering orbit around Ganymede. Multiple flybys of Callisto, Europe and Ganymede.
Juice is currently deploying instrument booms and antennas as part of the commissioning process. To assist with this, the rover is equipped with her two surveillance cameras, JMC1 and JMC2. JMC1 is looking obliquely at her one of the solar arrays and has a field of view where the deployed antennas are visible. JMC2 sits atop Juice and is designed to monitor complex radar deployments for the 52-foot (16 m) Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna.
ESA
JMC-1 captured three of the four images released by ESA, showing the Earth receding into the darkness of space, the solar array. JMC-2, on the other hand, photographed the undeployed RIME antenna. Two surveillance cameras also send back images of the flyby en route to Jupiter. As the mission progresses, high-definition scientific cameras will come online to record close-ups of Jupiter’s moons.
Source: ESA
