First Photos From ESA's JUICE As It Performed Never-Before-Attempted Gravity Maneuver

The European Space Agency's Juice mission is on its way to explore Jupiter’s icy moons, arriving in a few years, but to get there it's stealing some orbital velocity from Earth, Venus, and – for the first time – the Moon. These gravitational assist maneuvers are standard to slingshot missions about the Solar System but what JUICE did last night, and is about to do tonight, is anything but.

For the first time, a spacecraft is using two objects for a gravity assist maneuver instead of just one. This is the first-ever lunar-Earth flyby , carried out over two nights. It is such a daring maneuver that it required the launch window for the mission last year to be only 1 second long. Last night Juice successfully flew by the Moon, conducting some tests of the science instruments, including the ones that will study what’s underneath the icy exterior of the Jovian moons, and in the second leg, it will fly by Earth tonight.

“This could not be done in the lab. This will be an excellent test to check the performance of the radar in the context of the full spacecraft operating,” Nicolas Altobelli, planetary scientist with ESA, said during a press conference attended by IFLScience 10 days ago.

While most of the focus is on the science, the cameras will also be tested. Several images have already been shared online, with a few that have been lightly processed such as the main image above to show real color differences on the Moon.

This image was not actually taken by the proper scientific camera. It comes from the Juice Monitoring Camera, which is used to check the status of the booms and antennae.

The spacecraft will fly by Earth in just a few hours and that will put it on the right trajectory to go towards Venus, which it will reach in August 2025. It will then come back to Earth twice in September 2026 for more gravitational assists and then again in January 2029.

All the flybys will provide the speed to reach Jupiter in 2031, where Juice will study the system as a whole and Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto for three years, before orbiting Ganymede alone.