European Space Agency Mission To Jupiter Postponed

The European Space Agency (ESA) has postponed a planned launch of a satellite to the planet Jupiter.

Weather conditions showed there was a risk of lightning to the mission that aims to establish if the planet’s moons could sustain life.

ESA says it will try to launch the rocket again on Friday.

The eight-year journey from Earth to reach Jupiter’s major moons is one of the organisation’s most ambitious missions ever.

There’s good evidence that these the moons’ icy worlds – Callisto, Europa and Ganymede – hold oceans of liquid water at depth.

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.

This isn’t a crazy idea, says Prof Carole Mundell, the director of science at ESA.

“In every extreme environment on Earth, whether that’s high acidity, high radioactivity, low temperature, high temperature – we find microbial life in some form,” she told BBC News.

“If you look at the (volcanic) vents at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, these even look like alien worlds. There’s no reason why that microbial life should not be able to exist elsewhere, if we have similar conditions. And it’s those conditions that we want to study with Juice.”

The €1.6bn (£1.4bn; $1.7bn) mission was supposed to launch on Thursday 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 dispatch 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.