Flight controllers in Germany successfully freed the 52-foot (16-meter) antenna on Friday after nearly a month of effort, resolving a jam that had affected a crucial radar antenna on a European spacecraft destined for Jupiter.
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, nicknamed Juice, embarked on a decade-long voyage in April. Shortly after launch, a tiny pin stubbornly refused to budge, hindering the antenna from fully opening.
Controllers tried shaking and warming the spacecraft to get the pin to move by just millimeters. Back-to-back jolts finally did the trick.
The radar antenna will peer deep beneath the icy crust of three Jupiter moons suspected of harboring underground oceans and possibly life. Those moons are Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.
Juice will attempt to go into orbit around Ganymede. No spacecraft has ever orbited a moon other than our own.
The news wasn’t so good for NASA’s Lunar Flashlight spacecraft. After struggling unsuccessfully for months to get the Cubesat into orbit around the moon, the space agency called it quits Friday.
The Lunar Flashlight, which was launched in December, had the mission of hunting for ice in the shadowed craters of the lunar south pole. However, it is now heading back toward Earth and will subsequently enter deep space, maintaining a continuous orbit around the sun.
