In April the Juice spacecraft launched to investigate the icy moons of Jupiter, but there was a problem: an antenna was stuck and wasn’t deploying.
Earlier this year, the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Juice spacecraft launched on its mission to investigate the icy moons of Jupiter. The launch went off smoothly, but there was a problem during the spacecraft deployment phase: an antenna was stuck and wasn’t deploying properly. After several weeks of work and various attempts at fixes, the Juice team succeeded in getting the antenna deployed, and now ESA has shared more information about the problem and how it was solved.
The antenna that failed to deploy was the Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna, a 16-meter-long radar instrument that will be used to study the icy crusts of Jupiter’s moons like Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. It was folded up on the side of the spacecraft for launch and should have deployed when it was unlatched once Juice was in space. On April 17, the team on the ground gave the command to activate an actuator which should have moved a pin to open a bracket and let sections of the antenna deploy into place.
