ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, has recorded magnetic field data as its 10.6 m-long magnetometer boom deployed.

Juice launched on 14 April, with deployments and activation of its antennas, booms, sensors and instruments ongoing over the next months in a dedicated check-out period known as the commissioning phase.

The Juice magnetometer boom (J-MAG) was deployed on 21 April, when Juice was about 1.7 million km from Earth.

Data collected by J-MAG captured the moment of deployment itself.

The plot shows the magnitude of the magnetic field from two sensors, as indicated by the red and turquoise lines, before (flat line) and during the deployment (curving lines). The two sensors are mounted on the outer segment of the boom and separated by about 3 m. The labels OBS and IBS indicate the data from the outboard (OBS) and inboard sensors (IBS), respectively. OBS is mounted close to the end of the 10.6 m boom.

The left side of the plot shows the field trace before the boom deployment. The sensors are up against the side of the spacecraft and OBS is located close to two spacecraft thrusters, which are quite magnetic, explaining the difference in the two field magnitudes.

We've all heard that we should "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" to save the planet, but what about applying any of the "three R's" to space?

Researchers at USC Viterbi's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) are tackling this challenge—looking at how to reuse physical items that are already in space, namely, old satellites.

Legacy Satellites

There are currently several thousand satellites orbiting Earth. Many have already completed their missions or have outlived their primary lifespans—these are "legacy satellites." And while some of them may have broken hardware and will eventually run out of energy, leave orbit, and burn out in space, others are physically in good condition. So, the question becomes: what to do with them?

Alefiya Hussain, ISI Research Team Leader explained, "This project is looking at ways to possibly reuse satellites for different things. We are collaborating with the software company Tangram Flex to figure out how we can replace the software components within the satellites to re-purpose them."

She continued, "The approach we've taken is to look inside the satellite and say, this particular piece of software did this particular function before, can we actually replace that function to make it do something else as a path to repurposing it?"

The plan will keep Voyager 2's science instruments turned on a few years longer than previously anticipated, enabling yet more revelations from interstellar space.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from Earth, using five science instruments to study interstellar space.