ESA signs contract with Airbus to build a Jupiter probe

BBC : The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed a contract with Airbus for the construction of the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE). The €350 million ($384 million) contract is part of what is expected to be a more than €1 billion project. JUICE is scheduled to launch in 2022 and arrive around Jupiter seven years later. It will carry a large payload of cameras and spectrometers, a laser altimeter, ground-penetrating radar, a magnetometer, plasma and particle detectors, and radio science hardware. To power all of that equipment at such a great distance from the Sun, the probe will be equipped with a roughly 100-m² solar array, the largest ever flown on a planetary mission. On its mission, JUICE will use several planetary flybys to accelerate out toward Jupiter. Once there it will perform close passes of the Jovian moons Callisto and Europa before entering orbit around Ganymede.