The European Space Agency has solved a communications problem with its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer space probe as it readies for a Sunday flyby of Venus to use the planet’s gravity to accelerate its speed for an eventual trip to Jupiter. Photo by Anthony Anex/EPA
Aug. 27 (UPI) — The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer is ready for a planned flyby of Venus on Sunday after the agency fixed its communications system.
ESA officials commonly refer to the space probe as Juice, which recently lost contact with Earth due to a “communication anomaly.”
The anomaly temporarily blocked Juice’s ability to send information to Earth regarding its condition and status, the ESA announced on Monday.
“Thanks to swift and coordinated action by the teams at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, and Juice’s manufacturer Airbus, communication was restored in time to prepare for the upcoming planetary encounter,” agency officials said in an online announcement.
The space probe went silent on July 16 when the ESA’s deep-space antenna in Cebreros, Spain, and the ESA’s New Norcia station in Australia could not establish contact with it.
“Losing contact with a spacecraft is one of the most serious scenarios we can face,” said Angela Dietz, Juice spacecraft operations manager.
“With no telemetry, it is much more difficult to diagnose and resolve the root cause of an issue,” Dietz explained.
After ruling out problems with ground equipment, ESA engineers undertook 20 hours of troubleshooting to re-establish contact with the space probe while it was located on the other side of the Sun and nearly 125 million miles away from Earth.
They determined its medium-gain antenna was not aimed toward Earth and eventually were able to send a command that corrected the situation and restored contact with Juice.
The root cause was a software timing issue that weakened the space probe’s signal to Earth during the times it was scheduled to communicate its condition and telemetry.
“It was a subtle bug, but one that we were prepared to investigate and resolve,” Dietz said.
“We have identified a number of possible ways to ensure that this does not happen again,” she added, “and we are now deciding which solution would be the best to implement.”
The Juice space probe is scheduled to begin its flyby of Venus on Sunday, which would be its second of four planned flybys that are intended to give Juice gravity-assisted momentum to gain the speed required to travel to Jupiter.
The space probe also is executing two flybys of Earth and one of the Earth and moon, combined, before heading to Jupiter without using fuel.
The ESA’s Jupiter icy moons mission will take eight years to accomplish after launching on April 14, 2023.
The mission’s aim is to learn if three of Jupiter’s moons might support life.