Juice/SWI during the Lunar-Earth-Gravity-Assist (LEGA) - Part 1: General overview

Journal article, 2026

The Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (Juice) was the first spacecraft ever that performed a combined gravity assist using both the Moon and Earth in succession. The double flyby required highly precise navigation to succeed. The LEGA allowed Juice to make a shortcut through the inner solar system on its way to Jupiter, using less fuel than would have been otherwise required. On 19 August 2024, Juice had its closest approach to the Moon. This first part of the manoeuvre accelerated the spacecraft by approximately 0.9 kms-1 relative to the Sun. On 20 August 2024, the spacecraft swung past Earth. This second part of the manoeuvre reduced the spacecraft's speed by 4.8 kms-1 relative to the Sun. This was a unique opportunity for its payloads to observe the Moon and Earth from a close distance as both calibration and science targets. The Submillimetre Wave Instrument (SWI), a dual channel heterodyne spectrometer observed both targets in two far-infrared bands around 500 and 250 & micro;m wavelength in order to characterize and calibrate the overall performance of the instrument, including its receiver frontend, spectrometer backend and telescope mechanisms. In addition, the commanding pipeline and operations processes of the instrument were also tested close to its full range of flexibility using the relevant pipelines. In this paper we provide a contextual description of physical and functional characteristics of SWI, its operational principles and in-flight calibration activities during LEGA.