UPDATED: Lift off of ESA Jupiter mission postponed
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The European Space Agency (Esa) posponed the a satellite to the planet Jupiter, one of the organisation’s most ambitious missions ever.
The satellite was to leave Earth on Thursday on an eight-year journey to reach the giant planet’s major moons but now the lift off was postponed .
The final checks on the weather showed there was a risk of lightening. Scientists said lightning meant the weather conditions were not right for launch
The launch of Juice has been postponed for today due to a risk of lightning, the European Space Agency has announced.
“We are going to halt the launch operations for now, for today due to weather conditions,” a spokesperson said on its livestream of the launch.
“This is out of control, but it also reminds you that we do not take any risks when it comes to launching a satellite into space,”
The rocket, Ariane 5, and Juice are in a “stable and safe condition” on the spaceport, and a targeted launch date has been set for tomorrow.
There’s good evidence that these icy worlds – Callisto, Europa and Ganymede – hold oceans of liquid water at depth.
The Esa mission aims to establish whether the moons might also have the conditions needed to sustain life.
The project is known as the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice for short.
Juice is not seeking to detect life – it will not be sending back pictures of alien fish. But it could help determine whether conditions in the moons’ hidden oceans have at least a chance of supporting simple microbial organisms.
The €1.6bn (£1.4bn; $1.7bn) mission is scheduled to launch on an Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, at 09:15 local time (13:15 BST).
The Ariane doesn’t have the energy to send Juice directly to Jupiter, certainly not within a useful timeframe.
Instead, it will despatch the spacecraft on a path around the inner Solar System. A series of flybys of Venus and Earth will then gravitationally sling the mission out to its intended destination.
Arrival in the Jovian system is expected in July 2031.
