Paris:

A spacecraft launched last year will slingshot back around Earth and the Moon next month in a high-stakes, world-first manoeuvre as it pinballs its way through the Solar System to Jupiter.

The European Space Agency’s Juice probe blasted off in April 2023 on a mission to discover whether Jupiter’s icy moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa are capable of hosting extra-terrestrial life in their vast, hidden oceans.

The uncrewed six-tonne spacecraft is currently 10 million kilometres (six million miles) from Earth.

But it will fly back past the Moon and then Earth on August 19-20, using their gravity boosts to save fuel on its winding, eight-year odyssey to Jupiter.

Staff at the ESA’s space operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany began preparing for the complicated manoeuvre this week.

Juice is expected to arrive at Jupiter’s system in July 2031.

It will take the scenic route. NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is scheduled to launch this October yet beat Juice to Jupiter’s moons by a year.

Long and winding road

Juice is taking the long way around in part because the Ariane 5 rocket used to launch the mission was not powerful enough for a straight shot to Jupiter, which is roughly 800 million kilometres away.

Without an enormous rocket, sending Juice straight to Jupiter would require 60 tonnes of onboard propellant — and Juice has just three tonnes, according to the ESA.

“The only solution is to use gravitational assists,” Arnaud Boutonnet, the ESA’s head of analysis for the mission, told AFP.

By flying close to planets, spacecrafts can take advantage of their gravitational pull, which can change its course, speed it up or slow it down.

Many other space missions have used planets for gravity boosts, but next month’s Earth-Moon flyby will be a “world first”, the ESA said.

It will be the first “double gravity assist manoeuvre” using boosts from two worlds in succession, the agency said.

Juice will cross 750 kilometres above the Moon on August 19, before shooting past our home planet the following day.

The probe will leave Earth at a speed of “3.3 kilometres a second — instead of three kilometres if we had not added the Moon”, Boutonnet said.

As Juice whizzes past Earth and the Moon, it will use the opportunity to snap photos and test out its many instruments.

Down on Earth, some will be taking photos right back. Some lucky amateur sky gazers, armed with telescopes or powerful binoculars, may even be able to spot Juice as it passes over Southeast Asia.

– ‘Plate of spaghetti’ –

The move has been carefully calculated for years, but it will be no walk in the park.

“We are aiming for a mouse hole,” Boutonnet emphasised.

The slightest error during its slingshot around the Moon would be amplified by Earth’s gravity, potentially creating a small risk that the spacecraft could enter and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

The team on the ground will be closely observing the spacecraft — and have 12-18 hours to calculate and adjust its trajectory if needed, Boutonnet said.

He mostly feared a scenario in which the amount of course corrections needed would erase the gains from the double-world slingshot, meaning they would be “doing all this for nothing”.

If all goes well, Juice will head back out into interplanetary space — for a little while at least.

It will first head to Venus for another boost in 2025.

Juice will even fly past Earth twice more — once in 2026, then a final time in 2029 before finally setting off towards Jupiter.

Then comes the really tricky part.

Once Juice arrives at Jupiter, it will use a whopping 35 gravitational assists as its bounces around the planet’s ocean moons.

During this phase, the probe’s trajectory looks like “a real plate of spaghetti”, Boutonnet said.

“What we’re doing with the Earth-Moon system is a joke in comparison,” he added.

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Saturday released a satellite picture of day and night split in half on Earth’s surface. The image posted on X, formerly Twitter, shows the crossing of the Sun in the celestial equator in the sky and bringing autumn to the Northern Hemisphere. Sharing the picture, the space agency wrote, “Winter is coming. Day and night are split in half today, as the Sun crossed the celestial equator in the sky at 07:50 BST/08:50 CEST marking the autumn equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. This #Meteosat image was taken at 09:00 BST/10:00 CEST this morning.”

Winter is coming

Day and night are split in half today, as the Sun crossed the celestial equator in the sky at 07:50 BST/08:50 CEST marking the autumn equinox in the Northern Hemisphere.

This #Meteosat image was taken at 09:00 BST/10:00 CEST this morning (pic: EUMETSAT) pic.twitter.com/t7oUI36ai4

— ESA (@esa) September 23, 2023

Since being shared, the post has amassed a lot of reactions from social media users.

“This is an interesting post !” said a user.

“Incredible,” said another person.

“The autumn equinox has begun in the Northern Hemisphere. Shown here, a grand image of Earth from Meteosat in space with Africa, Europe, and the Middle East positioned to the front,” commented another user.

A person added, “Amazing; I had no idea the countries of the world were drawn onto the Earth like that.”

As per Space.com, Autumn began astronomically in the Northern Hemisphere and spring started in the Southern Hemisphere. “The sun is currently migrating south, having spent the previous six months shining directly on the northern half of our planet. So, at the official start time of autumn, the sun would appear directly overhead from a ship in the Laccadive Sea, positioned on the equator, 170 miles (275 kilometres) northeast of Addu City in the Maldives,” the website said. 

The Earth’s axis is tilted either towards or away from the sun for the majority of the year. It follows that the planet’s northern and southern portions receive different amounts of warmth and light from the sun. The Earth’s axis and orbit align at the equinox, distributing sunlight equally to both hemispheres.

Two Latin words that signify equal and night make up the word equinox. This is due to the fact that on the equinox, day and night are almost equal in length. However, depending on where you are on the planet, one may get a few some extra minutes.

Aditya L1 onboard the PSLV-C57 the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on September 1, 2023 on the eve of its launch. Photo: X/@ISRO via PTI

The European Space Agency (ESA) which had provided crucial support to ISRO to monitor the Chandrayaan-3’s health, will also be supporting Aditya-L1, providing deep space communication services to the mission.

“ESA’s global network of deep space tracking stations and use of internationally recognised technical standards allows us to help our partners track, command and receive data from their spacecraft almost anywhere in the solar system,” said Ramesh Chellathurai, ESA service manager, and an ESA cross-support liaison officer for ISRO.

Mr. Chellathurai added that for the Aditya-L1 mission, ESA is providing support from all three of its 35-metre deep space antennas over Australia, Spain and Argentina, as well as support from the Kourou station in French Guiana and coordinated support from the Goonhilly Earth Station in the UK.

Ground services

ESA said that it was the main provider of ground station services for Aditya-L1. ESA stations will support the mission from beginning to end: from the critical ‘Launch and Early Orbit Phase’, throughout the journey to L1, and then to send commands to and receive science data from Aditya-L1 for multiple hours per day over the next two years of routine operations.

The space agency added that from April to December 2022, ESA and ISRO teams had worked together intensively to evaluate ISRO’s strategy for operating the Aditya-L1 and challenge their new orbit determination software.

“With its experience flying and even rescuing missions at the Lagrange points, ESA was in the perfect position to help ISRO improve their new orbit determination software and demonstrate that it has the fidelity and accuracy that the organisation needs in order to operate a spacecraft at a Lagrange point for the first time,” said ESA flight dynamics expert Frank Budnik.

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