JUICE Mission officially passed the Critical Design Review (CDR)

JUICE Mission enters into the AIT phase, with Elecnor Deimos as responsible of planetary protection and mission navigation activities.

8th of April, 2019

On March the 12th 2019 JUICE mission officially passed the Critical Design Review (CDR), one of the most critical milestones in a mission lifecycle: the engineering phase is now completed and the team is now fully focussed on the spacecraft Assembly Integration & Test (AIT) phase to meet the ambitious goal of launch in 20/05/2022.

As responsible of the planetary protection, and being also involved in the mission navigation review and design, Deimos plays a key role in JUICE, the first ESA large-class mission in the Cosmic Vision programme. These two aspects are both critical for the Jovian mission success, because JUICE will have to perform 26 flybys around Ganymede, Europa and Callisto, navigating autonomously through the three Galilean moons and guaranteeing that Europa will not be contaminated under any possible mission failure. The dynamically chaotic nature of the Jovian system increases the complexity of these analyses and challenges the state-of-the-art techniques usually employed for autonomous navigation and impact probability calculations.

Scheduled for launch in 2022, with arrival in the Jovian system in 2029, JUICE will spend three-and-a-half years examining the giant planet’s turbulent atmosphere, enormous magnetosphere, its set of tenuous dark rings and its satellites. It will study the large icy moons Ganymede, Europa and Callisto, which are thought to have oceans of liquid water beneath their icy crusts – perhaps even harbouring habitable environments.

Find the link to the ESA’s new here: http://sci.esa.int/juice/61286-review-board-gives-juice-the-all-clear/ with an interesting video regarding the JUICE’s Jovian odyssey.