This Thursday, the European Space Agency (ESA) will send a satellite from French Guiana to study Jupiter and its three largest potentially life-giving moons in a mission that involves Portuguese companies, scientists and engineers.
Takeoff from the ESA base in Kourou, where Portugal Space President Ricardo Conde will be representing Portugal, is scheduled for 13:15 (Lisbon time) aboard the European Ariane 5 rocket.
The mission, due to launch in 2022, is led by aerospace engineer Bruno Souza as flight operations director, and antenna engineer Luis Rolo in the test phase of two of the satellite’s ten instruments. Both have worked for ESA for over 10 years.
The satellite includes components made by the Portuguese companies LusoSpace, Active Space Technologies, Deimos Engenharia and FHP – Frezite High Performance, as well as an instrument developed in part by Efacec and LIP – Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics, for which researcher Patricia Gonçalves was responsible. .
Juice (Jupiter ICy moons Explorer, Explorer of the Icy Moons of Jupiter) will study the largest planet in the solar system and the satellites of Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, where, according to scientists, liquid water (a fundamental element for life, as we know it) can exist ) under surface ice crusts.
The satellite should arrive at the gas giant eight years later, in July 2031, make 35 close flights to icy moons, and reach Ganymede in December 2034.
This will be the first time that an artificial satellite will orbit a moon of another planet.
The ESA mission, which cost about 1.6 billion euros and involved the North American (NASA), Japanese (JAXA) and Israeli (ISA) space agencies in terms of instruments and “equipment”, is expected to end in September. 2035.
The first scientific data is expected in 2032.
Jupiter is 11 times the size of Earth and is mostly made up of gas, just like the Sun. Ganymede is the largest of the solar system’s moons, with a large ocean beneath its surface.
The ESA mission was designed to find out if there are sites around Jupiter and inside icy moons with the necessary conditions (water, energy, stability and biological elements) to support life.
As Director of Flight Operations, Bruno Sousa oversees the “critical phase” of the satellite’s launch, helping one of the teams he leads make decisions to ensure that the craft then enters the “cruise phase”.
“My role as a flight leader is primarily to help the team make difficult decisions, take responsibility for the chosen course of action and monitor its implementation,” he told Lusa.
Upon completion of the launch, Bruno Sousa will leave this mission and continue to be responsible for other ongoing ESA interplanetary missions, namely to orbit Mercury (BepiColombo) and the Sun (Solar Orbiter).
Regarding the Juice satellite, the aerospace engineer, who has been with the ESA since 2007, said that “it will be able to study Jupiter as a prototype of the gas giants”, helping in the “exploration of exoplanets” (planets outside the solar system). ).
Bruno Sousa named communication with the satellite and energy production as mission objectives, given the distance of Jupiter from the Earth and the Sun, as well as radiation, which forced the installation of “most” electronic components in “storage facilities”.
In addition to shields that protect sensitive electronic components from high radiation, solar panels for power supply and an insulating layer from extreme temperatures, the satellite has an antenna to send data to Earth and a computer to solve some problems on its own.
One antenna, the smaller of the two attached, has a thermal coating manufactured by Porto-based FHP and its operating mechanism was developed by Coimbra-based Active Space Technologies.
Luis Rolo, an antenna engineer, worked on other antennas for the Juice mission. After working for ESA for 18 years, he tested a radio telescope antenna that will study the atmospheres of Jupiter, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and a radar probe antenna that will allow, by receiving signals, to determine the existence of groundwater on three moons.
Another instrument on the satellite, the radiation monitor, which is an energetic particle detector, was developed by LIP and Efacec in collaboration with the Norwegian company Ideas and the Swiss research institute Paul Scherrer.
Efacec has also been involved in building an instrument that will monitor the state of conservation of the satellite’s solar panels with the goal of “better energy management upon arrival at Jupiter, where there is little sunlight.”
LusoSpace has developed a coil that generates a magnetic field “which will be the reference” for a magnetometer, a device on board the satellite that will characterize Jupiter’s intense magnetic field and its interaction with the moon’s field, Ganymede.
Deimos Engenharia’s work was to “improve the mission’s basic autonomous navigation strategy” during the flyby of Europa’s Moon and “during the orbital phase of Ganymede”.
Currently, the only artificial satellite orbiting Jupiter is NASA’s Juno.
Portugal has been a member state of the ESA since 2000.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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