Airbus Defence and Space to build $350m Jupiter spacecraft

Posted on 14 Dec 2015 by Aiden Burgess
Schematic of the Jovian magnetosphere with Jupiter at its centre and its moons orbiting - image courtesy of Wikicommons and Volcanopele

Airbus Defence and Space has signed a $350m contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop and build the agency’s JUICE (Jupiter Icy moons Explorer) spacecraft.

JUICE is the first European mission to Jupiter and is the first large mission of the ESA Cosmic Vison programme – due to launch in 2022. The JUICE mission’s overarching theme is to explore the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants, as it will investigate the Jovian system with a focus on its icy…

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