Are we alone in the Universe? For the first time in human history, we are on the verge of characterising the atmospheres of distant rocky worlds that could resemble our own Earth. We will be able to search these atmospheres for signs of life, which we call biosignatures. Molecular oxygen (O2), which currently makes up…

Scheduled for launch in November 2031, EnVision is ESA’s next medium-class mission to Venus. Its goal is to trace the planet’s evolution “from core to cloud tops” and to understand why Earth’s twin followed such a radically different path. The payload combines a powerful S-band radar (VenSAR), a subsurface sounder, radio-science experiments, and the three-channel…

Featuring an eccentricity of ~0.21, Mercury’s orbit is the most elliptical among all the planets in the Solar System. During Mercury’s journey around the Sun, the varying gravitational pull periodically stretches and squeezes the planet, leading to observable surface radial tidal deformation (peak-to-peak amplitude of around 0.6 m at the polar regions and 2 m…

Our team participated in the analysis of an ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-178b, led by Dr. Luca Fossati from Graz (Austria), and collaborators. This is the third study by the research team on similar hot planets, where direct models accounting for Non-Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (NLTE) are used to constrain the planet’s atmospheric temperature, abundances, and mass loss…

The Ganymede Laser Altimeter, or GALA, is one of the key scientific instruments aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUICE mission, which was launched successfully on April 14, 2023, from French Guiana. JUICE, or the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, is designed to study some of Jupiter’s fascinating icy moons, including Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. GALA’s…

JANUS was selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) in February 2013 through an international open call for the JUICE scientific payload. The instrument was developed by a collaborative international team led by an Italian Principal Investigator, alongside contributions from institutions in Germany, Spain (IAA-CSIC), and the UK, including prominent research entities across Europe, Israel,…

Juan Luis Rizos offers the Solar System community a simulator for modeling the light curves of small bodies. This software is designed to analyze the brightness variations of rotating celestial objects, supporting both simple and complex rotation modes. Whether the object is spherical, ellipsoidal, or defined by custom shape files, the simulator provides a high…

Our colleagues, I. Mariblanca-Escalona and collaborators from the SciTechSS group have been carrying out a study on the activity of the Jupiter-family comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke during its 2021 apparition. Our team analysed visible imaging and long-slit spectrophotometry from the Calar Alto Observatory (Spain) to model the comet’s dust and gas emissions. We completed our dataset with…

The JANUS Team meets in Granada, at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, from the 25th to the 27th of February to hold its 7th Full Team Meeting. Scientists and engineers will discuss the technical performance of the instrument after its launch on April 14, 2023, as well as the images acquired during the JUICE…

Our colleague J.L. Ortiz, from IAA, has been leading a recent and very interesting work on one of the five official dwarf planets: Eris. This dwarf planet, orbited by its satellite Dysnomia, seems to have comparatively large albedo and density. Its presumably homogeneous surface prevented to determine its spin period for long until very recently,…