Juice Spacecraft Successfully Completes Venus Flyby, On Track for Jupiter Arrival
Paris – August 31, 2025 – The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Juice mission has successfully completed a crucial gravity assist maneuver at Venus, keeping the spacecraft on schedule for its enterprising journey to explore Jupiter and its icy moons. The flyby, which occurred earlier today, utilized Venus’s gravitational pull to accelerate Juice and refine its trajectory towards the Jovian system.
This maneuver is a key component of juice’s complex voyage, requiring four gravity assists – three from earth and one from Venus – to gain the necessary velocity to reach the outer solar system. The spacecraft frist passed Earth in August 2024. Following today’s Venus encounter, Juice will make two further Earth flybys before embarking on its final course for Jupiter in January 2029, with an anticipated arrival in 2031.
The Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) mission, launched in April 2023 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, is designed to investigate the potential for habitable environments beneath the icy surfaces of Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and callisto. the mission will focus particularly on Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, where Juice is planned to enter orbit in 2035 before ultimately deorbiting and impacting the moon’s surface. The spacecraft carries a suite of sophisticated instruments to study the moons’ subsurface oceans, icy shells, and potential for life.
