What’s next for Juice?

Instrument teams will continue to study the data, with many teams planning to publish papers on their results in the coming months.

“3I/ATLAS is a rare and unexpected visitor, its arrival came as a complete surprise,” says Olivier Witasse, ESA Juice Project Scientist. “But when we realised that Juice would be close to the comet around its closest approach to the Sun, we realised what a unique opportunity this was to collect a once-in-a-lifetime dataset.”

He continues: “Observing the comet was challenging, with no guarantee of success, but in the end, it turned into a great bonus for Juice during its journey to Jupiter.”

The closest Juice came to 3I/ATLAS was about 60 million km, whereas it will see Jupiter’s moons from just a few hundred kilometres away. Even so, being designed and equipped to study icy moons, Juice’s instruments were a great match for the icy interstellar comet.

We still have five years to wait before Juice arrives at Jupiter in 2031, but all its instruments will be switched on once again in September 2026 when Juice returns to Earth for another gravity assist.

“The data we are already seeing from Juice’s instruments is really promising,” says co-Project Scientist Claire Vallat. “We are getting more excited about how well they work and how much we will reveal about Jupiter and its icy moons in the 2030s.”