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17 Years From Now... Yesterday, NASA selected a few pieces of hardware that it will contribute to a robotic mission that the European Space Agency (ESA) is planning to launch to Jupiter less than a decade from now. Known as the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, or JUICE, this spacecraft would launch in 2022 and arrive at the Jovian planet in 2030...studying Jupiter and three of its largest moons, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, in sharp detail. NASA will be providing a science instrument (an Ultraviolet Spectrometer) plus a transmitter and receiver for a radar sounder that will be able to penetrate 5 miles into the crust of each of the aforementioned satellites. JUICE will be solar-powered, just like NASA's Juno orbiter that launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in 2011 and is now headed to Jupiter, where the probe will arrive in 2016.

While I'm excited for JUICE and every other Outer Planets project that is being proposed by space agencies around the world, the timeline for ESA's upcoming mission is a bit of a downer because of how long space aficionados like Yours Truly need to wait to see this flight get off the ground. (Yes, I know; this applies to every single craft that's sent out of the Earth's atmosphere.) By the time JUICE arrives at Jupiter, I'll be 51 years-old...with the assumption that I'll still care about space exploration that year. Which is likely (hopefully)— I remember worrying (upon first hearing about this mission in early 1992...when I was in 6th grade) that my interest in NASA would be gone by the time the Cassini spacecraft departed for Saturn in October of 1997. Well, not only was I still a space geek that year (I was a senior in high school at the time of launch), but I was on my computer keeping tabs of Cassini's progress, via NASA TV, as it entered orbit around Saturn 7 years later—in the summer of 2004. (I just graduated from college.) So it definitely won't be a surprise to see how fast time flies when I finally read about JUICE being brought out to the launch pad for its Jupiter-bound departure; though I'll probably be dealing with a mid-life crisis by then. Hah... Yay for mortality! That is all.


ESA / AOESImage