Welcome to the new episode of the Space Specials.
On the microphone is Farrah Eitmahal.
And opposite, right opposite of me is of course...
Hello Barbara, it's me, Niamh Shaw.
Always glad to be back.
And we have a very special conversation for you today,
because we've actually covered the JUICE launch.
What is the JUICE launch?
Yeah, it was great.
I was very lucky.
Being media sometimes is terrific.
Of course I was acting in my capacity as media.
The JUICE launch was the latest mission launched by the European Space Agency to Jupiter.
JUICE stands for Jupiter's, J-U-I-C moons, I-C-E, I-C moons, Explorer E.
And it is a very long mission.
It will take eight years for the spacecraft to get to Jupiter,
and then they will conduct research for the following eight years.
They're going to characterize particularly the magnetosphere of Jupiter,
because Jupiter is an extremely magnetically active planet
and has these weird interactions with all the moons, of which there are 95, I think, at the moment.
And then when it's done characterizing that, it will then analyze three of its major moons,
Europa, Callisto and Ganymede.
Also for some of them, they both, two of those, Europa and Ganymede,
have a lot of electrical or electromagnetic activity.
But also to see how effective they are in terms of their habitability,
because they have seen from Juno and previous missions to Jupiter
that there is evidence of water under the surface, particularly of Europa and Ganymede.
So they think it's salt water, more water than we have on our own planet.
So could this be an alternative for us to live on, you know,
if something happens on our planet?
There is suggestions that there is oxygen on Europa as well.
And then also to see if there is life on these moons, what does it look like?
They reckon it would be very primitive compared to life on Earth,
because it's so far away from the sun that they wouldn't use light-dependent interactions.
So, like, you know, photosynthesis would be the backbone of all plant life.
So when something is that far away, we wouldn't imagine there to be plant life.
But with the extensive amount of radiation, that could actually then kickstart life.
So they're doing it to characterize habitability and also to understand the magnetosphere of Jupiter,
but also to understand the whole interactions between Jupiter and the moons,
because Jupiter is essentially like a miniature solar system,
the way it's sort of this central object upon which other celestial objects orbit.
So if they understand the interactions between Jupiter and the moons,
we might be able to better understand our solar system,
but also the solar systems of other stars that have planets orbiting them or exoplanets.
So that's effectively juice in a nutshell.
So, wow. I mean, there are so many things which I find incredible.
First of all, Europa and Ganymede.
I think, you know, we have also these kind of icy landscapes in Antarctica.
And there's the Vostok station in Antarctica, which is a Russian research station.
And it's in the coldest place of Earth, which is as warm as Mars gets,
minus 80 or 90 degrees Celsius.
And but what they did, interestingly, they drilled through the kilometers of ice
in many, many years to find a lake, Lake Vostok, it's called,
and to see if they can find life in that lake or what kind of life they could find.
And I think that kind of future missions to Europa or Ganymede
could be something like that, that we drill through the layers of the ice
to find the maybe possible life forms.
And then these life forms in Europa would be completely alien.
Well, the amazing thing about this mission is that that's what they're doing.
Now, they're not actually physically cutting out cores
because they don't want to actually, you know, put any physical impact on the planet.
But they have a radar on board.
And so the radar will send out a signal.
And from that, they'll be able to figure out what the composition is
of the subsurface of those moons, which is incredible.
I think they're very keen not to, what's the word,
not to interact with the planets in any way that they contaminate them,
because they want to make sure that they get a proper analysis of them.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's incredible, like that there is so much water
on Ganymede and Europa, more water than we have on our planet.
So these are very water rich places.
But whether they could support human life, we don't know.
But it's certainly a very interesting and it's really, really interesting mission.
And because they knew it would it would take eight years to get there,
they threw all sorts of instruments on them.
So there's kind of three groups of instruments, one is kind of geological.
So they're like using the radar to be able to determine,
you know, like what the IC cores are made of and altmeters
to determine heights and things like that.
And then they have a series of spectral instruments.
So they're they're full of, you know, figuring out what's the spectra.
So they can they can they can understand what molecules are present in the air,
what molecules are present in the surface.
And then lastly, they have instruments that measure radiation and plasma waves.
Plasma waves are something that are that are they're very, very interested in,
because Jupiter is so active and electromagnetic.
Plasma waves are a way of determining how
the electrons and the protons from the different moons
interact with Jupiter's magnetosphere,
because they say that the that the the electromagnetic field
or magnetosphere of Jupiter is almost like the way our particle accelerator
works at CERN.
That's so Europa is basically Europa has them has a magnetic field
and Ganymede have a magnetic field.
And so the atmosphere of Europa, basically the the the magnetosphere
of Jupiter is literally stripping off electrons of Europa.
And then that's kind of feeding into the magnetosphere.
So it's like all this radiation is coming off Jupiter.
And a big part of the preparation for that for the mission was trying to figure out
how do we protect the spacecraft and the instruments on board
from all this magnetic radiation, not only when it arrives at Jupiter,
which is huge, but as it actually heads to Jupiter,
because we know once you go, you know, maybe five or six hundred kilometers
above Earth, all that protection that we have against radiation
that our atmosphere provides is gone.
And, you know, we would have seen that before.
When the Hubble telescope broke down and we had to send a crew
on the space shuttle to fix the Hubble telescope, just they were even just
800 kilometers above Earth and they they experienced
all these crazy kind of radiation storms and stuff.
And astronauts talking about that is incredible.
So they had to they had to look at the solar arrays
and put an extra layer of glass on them.
They also have an experiment that's running almost immediately
to figure out how much radiation is the spacecraft absorbing as it heads to
Jupiter, so that by the time they get to Jupiter, they've offset that
and make sure that that's not included in the calculations of whatever it is
that they measure when they get into the Jovian system.
So the the other thing is, which I'm, you know,
I want to know is what's the size and the weight?
I mean, all with all these instruments and it must be quite a big
probe going so far away.
And the other thing is eight years.
I mean, you know, if I would work on this project right now,
then, you know, I might be maybe even say if I'm 50 or 55,
then in eight years I'm nearly retiring.
So there's a new generation coming.
And then, you know, until it sort of gets somewhere else.
I mean, there are different stops, sort of for scene or stops or flybys.
Basically, I mean, it's a it's a long, long mission.
It's a really long mission.
But, you know, I think it was really weird.
This mission is particularly special to me because, you know,
I sort of came came into the space sector quite late in life.
It's sort of, you know, I had a I had a kind of a moment of clarity in 2011.
And then I sat in it for two years because I was too scared.
So 2013, I kind of started in earnest
and I got funded to do my first theatre show at the end of 2013.
So I had money for 2014 to do it.
And my first visit to the European Space Agency was to Nordveg
in the Netherlands, where is the space and technology center.
And it's also where they have the the future missions department.
So they plan a future mission.
So before they they kind of go and, you know, ask for contracts and stuff,
they do all the costings and the basic stuff.
And there was an I was making a video about space careers for Irish people.
And one of the very first person I interviewed
was this Irish guy, Brian Short.
And, you know, I should go look at the video
because he was sitting right in front of juice, a poster for juice.
And he was saying that's what he was working on.
That was 2014. Wow.
And I actually spoke to him when I was in Darmstadt
and he handed it over in 2015.
And then, you know, you have your science experiments,
then people propose experiments and they get then they get built
and then they get built into the into the spacecraft
and then they get to the moment of launch.
And then it then it moves across then.
And it's entirely then the science department's job then to,
you know, manage it from then on.
And the person that's the project scientist is a Frenchman called Olivier Vittas,
who I spoke to. And I was saying that to him.
I said, like, will this be your career defining mission?
Because you're going to be involved in this until 2035 at least.
And he said, yes, he says, I am.
He said, I'm working on other things because, you know,
for the next eight years, we're just waiting for this spacecraft to get to Jupiter.
But he was saying that he feels that he was recruited.
He was recruited in 2015.
And he knows he was recruited because he was young,
because he said there has to be some sort of consistency across the project
so that so that there's somebody who understands the whole life of the project.
But yeah, and exactly as as as you say, there are people now
that are involved in the mission, but their careers will be ending
by the time it arrives at Jupiter.
So they help build the instrument maybe, or they put in the proposal
or the preliminary and their department got the funding.
But by the time the spacecraft gets there,
more than likely they'll be on the way out.
And people who haven't yet even who aren't even in college
will more than likely be the people that will be taking those measurements
and writing the papers and then presenting them.
You know, it's incredible.
And then after that, he was also saying, then all the data
then goes on the public forum.
So that that data is available for years and years and years later.
So it has a really long and imprint
on the space science community.
And it's really a project across generations.
I mean, it's probably two years, you know, in sort of
in this time scale of a solar system or the universe,
we need just a blink of the eye.
And so it's like maybe three blinks is that mission.
And for us, it's sort of already that big.
That's right. We we we we have to figure out
another way of measuring time, I think, for ourselves when it comes to space.
I remember this is a segue, but it brings me back.
I remember when back, I think it was kind of in 2014 as well,
actually that same year I was asked to
present a kind of an event celebrating botany, which is the study of plants.
And I got a tour of the director of the botanical gardens in Dublin in Ireland.
And he said, you know, he said, trees move just as much as people do.
But we have a tendency to see trees only in our time frame.
He said, but if we saw trees in their time frame, they move and they shift
and they move as quickly as we do.
Obviously, they can't physically leave where they're from.
But he said like the the the the drunk twists and the the main branches move.
And we don't see it because we see it
relative to our perception of time in the same way.
As an analogy, a butterfly watching a human,
probably because they're only alive for a day or a couple of days,
they probably think that we don't move either.
You know, because for them, a whole day is a lifetime for us.
For us, it's just a day.
So we can't comprehend
that, you know, 32 years is nothing in terms of the history of the universe,
because for us, that's a massive chunk of time.
And like you say, it's it's a full career defining project
for for one person.
And they're all like that, like juice isn't an exception.
It's the norm at the moment.
We have Juno, which is a NASA run mission currently orbiting Jupiter.
And they have Europa Clipper coming up behind, which actually
is to juice and Europa Clipper.
NASA's Europa Clipper.
They are overlapping on a few things because
NASA is specifically focusing on Europa.
And in the same way that takes that's a 30 year mission.
And I don't know if if anyone saw the end of the Cassini mission.
They did this lovely,
they did this lovely kind of documentary about the people
that had been involved in it from the start.
And they were all near the end of their careers.
They were all in their 60s.
And they had seen Cassini from the start to the finish.
And they were watching the, you know, Cassini eventually.
What happened to it is it just flew into Saturn and disintegrated
then, you know, as it went into the atmosphere and they were crying.
And Cassini had been pushed to the side.
And some of them, like their work was just, you know, keeping an eye on Cassini.
And nobody really cared.
And they were just kind of left to some sort of like quiet office
to be found there.
But and it's and it's it's the same with all of these missions,
like the Voyager mission that headed off in 1978,
you know, with the Golden Record.
And it's a really humanistic one, which you and I care about,
and especially with the Golden Record on board.
But in the same way, like that's 43, 44 years into its mission now.
And so there's just a couple of people now keeping an eye on Voyager,
checking this little blip that happens regularly.
But they're they're lifetimes of people's work, you know,
and with 10 instruments on board juice, there is so much data
that's going to be generated.
This will this will provide many PhDs
and many research funded projects for for for many, many hundreds of people.
But most importantly, it should help us better understand
how solar systems work and how the magnetosphere interacts.
And is there any opportunity for for life on these moons of Jupiter,
in which case are they even moons?
Are they planets of a planet?
So you already talked a little bit about people.
You mentioned a couple of times who is involved in that project.
And just before you, how big is it?
How big and how heavy is it?
So it's quite heavy.
I think it's like I think it's about three and a half tons,
but two point three tons of it is actually fuel.
So it's it's a little over a ton in weight, which is a thousand kilograms.
It's probably a car, like a heavier car.
Probably about a car.
And so it packed into the fairing.
I think when it was packed into the fairing, I think it was two and a half
meters square, but they have it has a very big
and it has a very big solar panel array because it needs to go so far.
So when it's completely folded out, I think it's 16 meters long by
I think eight meters high or something.
So it's a lot bigger than than normal.
You know, it's sort of the width of a street a little bit
less than like a small lane, maybe the width of the lane.
A smaller street, I would say.
Yeah. And most of the weight is the propellant to make sure
that it's able to do all those flybys.
And, you know, it's it's it's trying to use
other planets to help, you know, propel it forward.
So it's gone now in the direction of the sun and it comes back
in our direction in August 2024.
And we're going to use the combined gravitational force of the moon
and the earth, which has never been done before, to give it a good old
kind of a push.
And then it heads to Venus and Venus gives it a push.
And then it comes back to Earth and then we give it another push.
And then that's it. It's off.
And it takes, I think, another four or five years to get to Jupiter.
So it needs it needs its fuel.
And then when it gets to Jupiter, it hangs around Jupiter for a fair bit.
And then it does, I think, 23 or 31 flybys in total off the three moons.
The majority of them are around and Ganymede, but they do a few around
Europa and a few around Callisto, mainly around Ganymede.
And then that's it then end of life.
Depending on how much fuel is left, then they'll decide what to do next.
But what they will probably do is they'll just fly it into Ganymede
that for its end of life, which is around 2035.
So, but yeah, people involved.
People involved. So there are agencies or.
Yes, NASA is involved.
There is NASA has a hard has it has an instrument on board and JAXA,
the Japanese space agency, have instruments on board.
And then it's a lot of many ESA, right?
Yeah, it's mainly ESA.
Germany have a lot of missions on board.
DLO are involved. And then there's a team of Sweden.
But the Swedish team have actually got an Irish team, a part of theirs.
They're all involved.
They're all interested in the radiation and the plasma waves.
And then, as I said, there's ten instruments on.
There's ten instruments on board and they're using them for spectral analysis,
radiation and then geological kind of things.
So there's kind of three there's kind of three remits.
But yeah, it's it's really packed.
But they're right, because you can only do this once.
You know, it takes so long to get there, you know.
And so you've been following the launch.
It was launched on a European rocket on the.
Yeah, very high.
It was delayed by a day.
So, you know, at this time of year,
the French or the ESA launch site is is Kuru in French Guiana.
And so it was a really stormy day on April the 12th,
which was the day it was launched, which was this Thursday.
And it was kind of sad really, because
they had done a lot of PR for it.
They so they did this lovely thing for the launch,
was they wanted artwork on the rocket
and they put out a poster competition for kids to
to enter their art projects.
And this girl from Ukraine, who submitted it
when she was eight years of age, I think her name was Irina.
And it was lovely. It was it was of Jupiter and kind of earth.
And it was sort of, you know, they were anthropomorphized.
So they had the eyes and stuff and it was really cute.
And she actually was there on the day she was there.
And then she had 10 with her parents.
So I got to speak to her for a minute.
They had created a cocktail, a mocktail, which means
a virgin cocktail and because of juice, you know, so they had
they done a competition as well for different cocktails and stuff.
And they had they had quite a glitzy kind of
launch event in a in a conference room.
But everybody they they went ahead with it
and they did a countdown up until 10 minutes before lunch.
But actually, they knew about an hour previously
that it wasn't going to go ahead
because the weather was unfavourable.
And so some of the people and I felt most sorry
for the research teams that were there, the scientists that were there.
A lot of them were present for the launch.
They weren't able to go to Peru, but they were there in Darmstadt,
which, of course, is is mission control now for the for the spacecraft.
Once once once launch was finished, they handed over to mission control
and the operation center.
So they were there.
And so the following day, the Friday, it was a much quieter affair.
So at Darmstadt, they have a media kind of center and it's it's very nice.
Actually, they have a wall that they can put a big kind of
big vinyl poster and they have a lecture.
And so and media are there and they're given lots of briefings
and they're given all the background and stuff.
So they use that space for the second day.
So there was probably about 50 of us there, maybe.
So the core science team were there. Media was there.
They had a social media event and they and they were there.
And then there was some staff and then they had they in the canteen as well.
They were broadcasting
the live feed from from Peru as well.
So I in a way it was kind of nicer because
I really got to know the science that the people involved on the second day.
And when it launched first, you know, the launch was fine.
Then, you know, you wait for the separation of the of the of the payload
from the rocket and that went fine.
And then they were waiting for a signal to come back,
because they were saying that after once they once they separated from the rocket
and the spacecraft still has an outer covering the fairing.
And then they take that off.
And the spacecraft, for whatever reason, it was in a spin.
And I think it's something to do with making sure that it gets enough momentum
and stuff. And so they had to control it to stop that
to get to put it on course.
And then they had to wait for a signal.
And the signal was delayed by about 20 minutes.
So people were going, oh, no, oh, no, it's not going to happen.
Thankfully, the signal came in.
And then the last thing people were waiting for was that they that the
that the arrays, the solar arrays would deploy and they would open out.
And they did. And that was it then.
And it was quite subdued.
Actually, then there was a bit of prosecco passed around.
But by that stage, I was kind of looking for my train home kind of thing,
you know, and everybody was sort of leaving.
But for the science teams, you know, I'm they were really happy.
And we did a group picture with the science teams on that,
you know, on the stage of the media center.
And it means a lot to them, you know.
Oh, yes, definitely, because they have been working for such a long time
on that they don't just come for the launch.
They've been in that.
And so that is sort of the the final step
of initiating the mission of, you know, of sort of,
you know, really seeing, you know, what comes back from the experiments,
you know, will everything work?
What will we see? What kind of data will we get?
And also, it's sort of a little bit adventure,
even if one cannot participate in person.
But one sort of, you know, has put so much sweat
and hours into these pieces, into that hardware that I think one really
identifies with, you know, what's going there and maybe sort of, you know,
a little bit of the scientist's
spirit is maybe, you know, in this part there.
Yeah, and like they would have competed to have their instrument
on board in the first place.
So, you know, like so once this got greenlit by ESA,
then they put out a call and then and then not everybody's experiment
gets to go on board.
So they would have had to work really hard for the funding applications.
And then they would have had to build it and they would have had to test it
and everything. And then they go there and like they were all like white
faced when that signal didn't come through because they were going, oh no, oh no,
because they're thinking of the next, you know, that they're there.
They've got a plan and, you know, research departments
are aren't very heavily funded, you know, and they're thinking of, oh my gosh,
I've got this, you know, they've got this plan in their head
that they're going to be OK for the next eight years or whatever.
And all that kind of kind of goes awry.
So it was great that it actually kind of went went off without a big,
a big mission. And I think ESA has been to European Space Agency
has been especially successful in these scientific missions
in all kind of directions.
And so so I think it's another good start
for a multi generation mission, I would say.
Yeah, and I think it's going to be a big one.
You know, it's like every now and again, you know, they do a lot of missions
that people don't hear about, like they have, you know, chaos at the moment,
which is looking at, you know, it's looking at other exoplanets
that are out there and they have Euclid coming up and they've all these different ones.
But this one seemed to capture the imagination
because there's just something about planets that we like.
So it's they're just easier, I think, for them to communicate.
So I'm really glad that it went very well for them, you know,
because they're always deploying new satellites.
Nobody cares. You know, the Sentinel satellite or whatever.
And chaos. Nobody cares about that.
That went I think that launched around 2020, you know, and James Webb was huge
because that's a big that's a big telescope.
But I think juice kind of had its moment, which was great.
People were genuinely interested.
And and you're right. And I mean, fair play to them.
They got every step of it. Absolutely bang on.
Ariane did a great job.
And and and who built it was an airbus that built this spacecraft.
I can't remember who built the spacecraft for them.
You know, but but so I think, you know, all of them did their job.
They did it really, really well and everything kind of happened, you know,
when you see, you know, in the last week or so
the ice face trying to land on the moon and they got so close like you can't.
You can take nothing for granted when it comes to space.
So we got through to the next phase and hopefully when it gets to Jupiter,
we'll still have the signal and it won't be destroyed by the magnetic radiation
along the way or whatever, you know, but fair play.
It's great. Yeah. So that's the light operations manager.
I'm very happy.
He's a commuter.
He said that this is the largest deep space mission he has ever launched.
Yeah, I think also that point out here, it's a deep space mission.
And that is also makes it clear that it's both very far away.
Yeah, it's it's incredible.
I mean, it's very I have to say it's it's it's big thinking on Isis part.
And fair play to them. You know, I mean, it cost a couple of billion,
but I think it was money well spent because I think it'll pay dividends
for science and I think that we will really understand
more about Jupiter than we than we currently know,
because we really only have gone as far as Mars.
And this is this is a big one.
Normally NASA does these big missions, but it's lovely to see Issa
kind of doing doing their own mission and fair play to them.
It was part of Cosmic Vision.
So that was the first round of their, you know, the big strategy.
And it was the first big project that they signed off on.
And so that's why it's taken 16 years for us to get to it.
And there's no 16 years left to go, which is great.
Yeah, yeah, it's one of these, you know, grand space project
like the International Space Station or other ones.
You know, we mentioned before, it's that I would just have this extended
lifetime and which, yes, you know, have built by
have been built by generations and sort of build and also researched
with by generations.
And I hope that actually we get some nice pictures as well.
So I'm really curious to see all these sort of flybys, swingbys,
you know, of all these celestial bodies and planets.
And that should be great.
Yeah, it should be, you know, add some great new pictures to it.
Yeah. And as ever, we've come to the end.
It comes in so fast.
Always, always.
So it was lovely to speak to you.
And thanks for sharing all those insights and knowledge.
We haven't sort of had that
for a while with such a new mission.
I mean, we've been talking about sort of many other things,
but it's a very special occasion.
And, yeah, please.
Thanks to all the listeners and tune in every third Tuesday of the month
between 2 and 2.30 on Radio Orange.
So thanks and goodbye and until next time.
Copyright WDR 2021