Project funded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA) and Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI).
JUICE is the first large-class mission chosen as part of the ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme, it is aimed to study Jupiter and to investigate the potentially habitable zones in the Galilean icy satellites: Ganymede, Europa and Callisto.
The Jupiter tour includes several flybys of each planet-sized world, and it ends with orbit insertion around Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System. JUICE will carry the most powerful scientific payload ever flown to the outer Solar System. It consists of 10 state-of-the-art instruments plus one experiment that uses the spacecraft telecommunication system with ground-based instruments. JUICE’s instruments will enable scientists to compare each of these icy satellites and to investigate the potential for such bodies to harbour habitable environments such as subsurface oceans. They will also carry out observations of Jupiter, its atmosphere, magnetosphere, satellites and rings.
The spacecraft will carry a number of instruments for studying different aspects of the Jovian system. Radar for Icy Moon Exploration (RIME) is one of the payloads that will be carried on board JUICE. RIME is a radar sounder instrument optimized for the penetration of the Galilean icy moons up to a depth of 9 km. The proposed RIME is unique as it is the first instrument to be deployed to Jupiter and the outer Solar System capable of performing direct subsurface measurements. Therefore, RIME is a key instrument for achieving groundbreaking science on the geology and the geophysics of Ganymede, Europa and Callisto.
