Deployment of the first segment of Juice's RIME antenna

The procedure to deploy Juice's RIME antenna began on 17 April 2023, three days after the launch and with everything having proceeded smoothly up until that point.

Continuing this trend, the first step went without a hitch. Two monitoring cameras, mounted onboard the spacecraft, were used to follow the RIME deployment. From the downloads, the antenna segment was visible on one image, and then not on the next. In between the images, the NEA had fired, the pin had released and the antenna segment had snapped into place. A check of the external camera’s image showed the segment in place, and the telemetry data also confirmed this. It showed that the spacecraft was oscillating as expected from the sudden deployment of the boom, and that the Attitude and Orbit Control System (AOCS) was correcting for the last of these movements.