After the launch of the mission was suddenly cancelled on Thursday because of the worsening of weather conditions in Kourou, French Guiana, the JUpiter ICy moon Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft finally took off on Friday, 14 April at 14.14. The university community that had gathered at the Ferrari Campus in Povo had to meet again to follow the second, successful take-off.
This time all went according to plan: the spacecraft take-off at 14:14, separation at 14:42, signal pick up at the base of the European Space Agency in Darmstadt (and official start of the mission) at 15:04 and finally, at 15:33, the opening of the solar panels with the confirmation of the mission's success by ESA.
Many people met at the Rectorate in Trento to watch the live broadcast of the launch. A group of researchers of the Rime instrument commented the various phases of the launch in the conference room of Palazzo Sardagna in front of an enthusiastic audience. Among those present were Deputy Rector Paola Iamiceli and Professor Elena Ioriatti, who is a member of the Academic Senate of the University, and the Mayor of Trento Franco Ianeselli. During the event Lorenzo Bruzzone, principal investigator of Rime and professor of the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at UniTrento, joined in via video link.
This however is just the beginning of the first of ESA's major missions in the Cosmic Vision programme that is focused on Jupiter's icy moons: with ten international instruments on board, Juice will try to understand what are the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life and how the Solar System works.
All eyes are on the space radar RIME - Radar for Icy Moon Exploration, one of ten instruments on board of the Juice mission that was conceived and designed by a team of international scientists led by Bruzzone. The instrument will be tested soon, in a few days, and the works will also involve the Science Operation Center of UniTrento.
The Remote Sensing for Digital Earth research unit of the Bruno Kessler Foundation (Digital Society research center), led by researcher Francesca Bovolo, made an important contribution for the automatic processing of data acquired by the space radar.