Ariane 5 for flight VA260 carrying ESA's Juice mission is seen here fully integrated and ready for rollout for its planned April 13, 2023 launch from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana.

Juice—JUpiter ICy Moons Explorer—is humankind's next bold mission to the outer solar system. After an eight-year journey to Jupiter, it will make detailed observations of the gas giant and its three large ocean-bearing moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.

This ambitious mission will characterize these moons with a powerful suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments to discover more about these compelling destinations as potential habitats for past or present life. Juice will monitor Jupiter's complex magnetic, radiation and plasma environment in depth and its interplay with the moons, studying the Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giant systems across the universe.

More and more miniature satellites are being launched every year, driving up demand for smaller rockets.

Contemporary life would hardly be possible without satellites. Much of what people do on Earth today relies heavily on what's happening high above their heads—from monitoring wildfires, deforestation and sea-surface temperatures to enabling connections to new mobile technologies like 5G in hard-to-reach areas.

A recent wave of cheaper, miniature satellites being sent into low orbits of 500 to 1,000 kilometers above Earth by the likes of Elon Musk's SpaceX and UK-based OneWeb signals a growing trend.

Less is more

With some tracking the globe's whole landmass and providing unprecedented detail, these satellites can be the size of a shoebox or even smaller.