“The main science objectives of Juice is to study Jupiter and its space environment, with a special focus on the habitability of Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, which are all believed to have vast saltwater oceans under their thick ice surfaces. But in order to study the habitability of these moons we need accurate and detailed measurements. Accordingly, any perturbations need to be fully characterised and corrected for.”

The lorry-sized Juice bristles with a total of ten cameras, probes and antennas. Its two most sensitive instruments to surface charging are its Radio and Plasma Wave Investigation, RPWI, package and its Particle Environment Package, PEP, which will sample the plasma environment surrounding Jupiter, whose powerful magnetic field is surpassed in size only by that of the Sun’s own equivalent field.