Juice: why’s it taking sooo long

At the time of writing, five months after launch, Juice has already travelled 370 million kilometres .

At their closest point in orbit, Earth and Jupiter are separated by almost 600 million km .

The more mass the spacecraft has, the more fuel it needs to carry, which increases its weight and makes it more difficult to launch.

Engineers must calculate the ideal time to make the jump on a circular path from Earth ’s orbit to where Jupiter will be when the spacecraft arrives, not where it is when it arrives.

Engineers need to control the spacecraft's mass, balancing the amount of fuel with the instruments it needs.

Juice will use series of flybys of Earth , the Earth -Moon system and Venus to set it on course for its July 2031 rendezvous in the jovian system.

Juice will get close to Jupiter ’s moons, trading energy with them that they’ve held onto for billions of years .

Could there be life under the frozen oceans of Ganymede, Callisto or Europa ?.