Juice spacecraft forming wake in solar wind

A spacecraft in flight cannot help but change the space about it – which can pose problems. A new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics presents a study on how ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, is interacting with the solar wind. The consequences include potentially problematic surface charging, a dense cloud of photoelectrons that surround the spacecraft and a more than 65-m-long wake of ion-free space behind it, resembling the trail of a boat.

#engineering #technology #space #science #esa #europeanspaceagency
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