Other Workshops: Mission to Jupiter's Icy Moons: The Making of JUICE: The Full Movie

I really like this film.  The enthusiasm of the people involved comes through very clearly.  They love this project.  At the end, you can see a person from the ESA team crying with emotion when they received word that telemetry had been picked up from JUICE -- it had survived the launch. 

Imagine the difficulties involved in doing this across many countries and many languages, in the midst of the COVID pandemic.   Three cheers for all those who made this happen. 

I put this in the "Other Workshops" category.  At some points the workshop seems to be all of Europe.  At other times (like when they move JUICE to the test facility) it seems like one specific place. 

I wonder how the procedures we see in this film compare to the famed spacecraft-building procedures of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.  But just remember:  When it came time to launch the Webb Space Telescope, NASA opted to launch from the ESA facility in French Guiana.  Their Ariane rocket apparently had a better success rate than ours.  But it did seem to me that they did discover problems with some of the instruments in the thermal phase of the "shake and bake" but then corrected them without re-running the thermal tests.  Was that a violation of test principles? 

Watching this movie makes me really want to take out my small telescope and aim it at Jupiter (which is now high in our evening sky). 

We see a lot of "soul" built into this new machine:  the inclusion in the spacecraft of a copy of pages from Galileo's Starry Messenger and the names of those involved in the project, and the selection of the faring logo from a children's contest,  for example.  Yaryna, the young Ukrainian artist who drew the logo at age 8, even mentions "soul" in her remarks.  

Godspeed, JUICE!