Juice flyby of Ganymede (artist’s impression) ESA (acknowledgement: ATG Medialab)īut when the command was given, cameras on the spacecraft showed that the antenna didn’t budge. 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. 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. 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. 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 launch went off smoothly, but there was a problem during the spacecraft deployment phase: an antenna was stuck and wasn’t deploying properly. Earlier this year, the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Juice spacecraft launched on its mission to investigate the icy moons of Jupiter.
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