The Juice European spacecraft, created for the study of Jupiter and its ice satellites, briefly lost its connection with the Earth. This happened just a few weeks before an important maneuver – a flight past Venus, which will take place on August 31.
Juice (Jupiter ICY MOONS Explorer) was launched in April 2023 and will reach Jupiter in 2031. To get to the goal, he uses gravitational maneuvers near the planets that accelerate his movement. The flight past Venus will be the second such stage.
On July 16, the connection with the device was unexpectedly interrupted. Specialists of the European Space Agency (ESA) first checked ground equipment, and then suggested a failure in the antenna or communication amplifier. Since it was too risky to wait for automatic restart, the engineers began to send the commands “blindly”. After the sixth attempt, they managed to restore contact.
It turned out that the problem is related to an error in the program that controls the power amplifier. The device did not receive damage, and the engineers quickly established the correction.
The Juice mission is designed for 2.5 years of work in the Jupiter system, where the probe will be studied by Ganyud, Callisto and Europe – objects that can hide oceans under the ice and be potentially inhabited.
