7 Things You Need To Know About NASA's Big Jupiter Mission

1. What Next?

It looks as though we're not quite through with Jupiter yet, and Juno will not be the last little robot we fire at it.

The Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (or JUICE for short) is a project proposed by the ESA to explore the Jovian system and take a close look at the Galilean moons of Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, but leaving out the volcano encrusted Io. The mission is due to launch in 2022, make some flybys of the inner solar system and eventually reaching Jupiter in the 2030s.

One of the key purposes of looking at these moons, is to assess their suitability for supporting life, whether local or in the form of a human colony.

Now, you don't just go scouting out planets (or moons) for their habitability, with a rough plan to one day go there. Although no official missions have been floated, NASA has made tentative noises about the potential to mine many of the moons and planets in our solar system for resources for a while.

Who knows, we could be taking the first steps to off-world colonies, and you can watch it all unfold on Twitter. What a time to be alive.

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