Contact has been re-established with the European Juice probe headed for Jupiter.

The alarm has been called off for the European Juice probe , headed for Jupiter and its moons . European Space Agency engineers have managed to re-establish contact after it was lost on July 16, 2025, when ESA's antenna in Cebreros, Spain, failed to communicate with the spacecraft, indicating a problem on board. Everything is now ready for its Venus flyby, scheduled for August 31 , which will allow Juice to adjust its orbit and gain the speed needed to reach the gas giant in 2031 , after two more Earth flybys. "Losing contact with a spacecraft is one of the most serious scenarios we can face," comments Angela Dietz, Juice operations manager: "Without telemetry, it is much more difficult to diagnose and resolve the cause of a problem." ESA had initially feared that the probe had entered "survival" mode , which is activated in the event of multiple failures. In this mode, the spacecraft began to rotate slowly, sending a signal to Earth once an hour, but this intermittent communication was not detected . At that point, there were two options: wait for the next automatic reset, which would occur after 14 days, or send commands 'blindly' into space, in the direction where Juice should have been located. Since waiting was not an option, given the approaching rendezvous with Venus, the technicians began sending commands to the probe, which at the time was 200 million kilometers from our planet and on the opposite side of the Sun. Finally, after about 20 hours of attempts, one of the commands reached Juice, triggering a response that allowed the signal amplifier, which had been shut off due to a very small system defect, to be reactivated.