Juice’s journey and Jupiter system tour

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, is set to embark on an eight-year cruise to Jupiter starting April 2023. The mission will investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants and the Jupiter system as an archetype for the numerous giant planets now known to orbit other stars. This animation depicts Juice’s journey to Jupiter and highlights from its foreseen tour of the giant planet and its large ocean-bearing moons. It depicts Juice’s journey from leaving Earth’s surface in a launch window 5–25 April 2023 and performing multiple gravity assist flybys in the inner Solar System, to arrival at Jupiter (July 2031), flybys of the Jovian moons Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, orbital insertion at Ganymede (December 2034), and eventual impact on this moon’s surface (late 2035). An Ariane 5 will lift Juice into space from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou. A series of gravity assist flybys of Earth, the Earth-Moon system and Venus will set the spacecraft on course for its July 2031 arrival