Successful Earth flyby improves Juice’s course to Jupiter

What happened

The flyby deflected Juice by an angle of 20° compared to its pre-flyby path and increased its velocity by 3.5 km/s. In the four weeks before the flyby, spacecraft operators only had to give Juice one tiny nudge (out of six opportunities set aside) to put it on exactly the right approach trajectory to make the most of Earth’s gravity.

Juice’s closest approach was at 13:45 CEST (11:45 UTC) on 28 September. As Juice flew just 8640 km above the Indian Ocean, it snapped a series of images with its onboard monitoring cameras .

Colleagues from ESA's spacecraft operations, science operations and technical centres spent months working hard with the external teams working on Juice's 10 science instruments to plan which instruments to switch on and when. Thanks to their efforts, the team has been able to squeeze out as much operational time as possible considering tight spacecraft resources.