We’re going out looking for life. Its out there somewhere. Not here, on Earth, that’s all doom and depression and gloom and Arsenal top of the league. We’re looking for life… elsewhere!!! To be precise, on the moons of Jupiter. Well, why not? Gotta start somewhere. So we are going, and that’s proper, European ‘we’, even though it ‘got done’ and everything, we’re still included, on geographical grounds, plus we gave all those foreigners 1.4 billion quid of MY hard-earned tax money to pay for the trip. And what a trip.

The rocket took off yesterday, in French!!! …trios, deux, un… bang! Never heard a countdown in French before, quite disconcerting. Thought all the French speakers were on strike and rioting or retiring early before Macron can change the age. Anyway, it took off, that’s the first worry over. Big rocket. Not electric, I’m guessing. By the amazing amount of smoke, steam, emissions and pollution coming out from the back of it. Even though there’s no Americans involved in it at all.

When it gets above the atmosphere it’ll drop its space probe called ‘Juice’ (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) which is quite a neat little thing, other than the two massive ‘sails’ on either side, each about 10 metres across which are solar panels, otherwise how’s it gonna get there? Refuel? Plug it in on Venus, FFS? And then it will travel 6.6 billion kilometres in the next eight years!!! In fact, thinking about it, it doesn’t need ‘propulsion’ once its moving; there’s no friction to slow it down, its a perfect vacuum so it’ll just go. For just eight years, which I worked out is an average speed of 94,000 kilometres per hour. Which it can only achieve because there’s no speed cameras in outer space.

The power supply is for the electronic gadgetry, cameras, imagery and controls and stuff which may be rather useful otherwise it’ll get lost in space, which is no good to anyone.

It will visit 3 of Jupiter’s moons, all of which contain water, so may possibly hold ‘life’. We’re not talking little green men, nor women, not even, like, a few cows, or fishes, but just bacteria. The stuff we avoid here ‘like the plague’ (plagues are defined as ‘bacterial in nature’, in case you didn’t know), so we fly 6 billion miles to find it on Jupiter. Hope they have hand sanitiser on board.

And its so exiting, the next eight years will have us… well, not much really, not til we get there.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx