Current Space Missions with Bernese Involvement

JUICE was launched on April 14, 2023 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana. It is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter in July 2031. Several flybys throughout the journey bring JUICE back near Earth. A Lunar-Earth flyby occured in August 2024, a Venus flyby in August 2025 and two more Earth flybys are scheduled for September 2026 and January 2029.

PEP and NIM

The Particle Environment Package (PEP) was selected by ESA to be part of the 11 scientific instruments on JUICE. PEP is a consortium of six science instruments. The University of Bern contributes to PEP with the Neutral and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NIM).

PEP's six instruments are able to measure neutral gas, thermal plasma, positive and negative ions, electrons, and energetic neutral atoms in the energy range from 1 eV to 5 MeV. The PEP instruments are organized into two groups: PEP-Lo and PEP-Hi. PEP-Lo is organised in two units, the Nadir Unit and the Zenith Unit. The University of Bern is responsible for the entire mechanical system engineering and qualification of the PEP-Lo Nadir Unit, which houses NIM and two other instruments. This includes the design and fabrication of the unit's mechanical parts, the assembly and integration of the participating instrument and the verification at system level. The University of Bern also contributed hardware to another PEP instrument (JNA).

The NIM instrument is a highly sensitive mass spectrometer for neutral atmospheric gas and ionospheric ions specifically developed for the tenuous gases of planetary exospheres. It is a time-of-flight mass spectrometer using an ion mirror for performance optimisation. It will be used to measure the chemical composition of the regular atmosphere produced by sublimation, energetic particle bombardment, and photon interaction with the surface of the icy Jovian moons.

GALA

As part of its mission, JUICE will orbit the Jovian moon Ganymede and perform a detailed investigation of it. The Ganymede Laser Altimeter (GALA) on board JUICE will perform topographic mapping and contribute to a large scale geodesy experiment. GALA was developed by DLR (Germany), but its rangefinder system with the associated software was provided by the Planetary Imaging Group of the University of Bern's Space Research and Planetary Science Division (WP). The instrument uses a similar system to BELA (BepiColombo mission), which was developed at the University of Bern.

BepiColombo was launched on October 20, 2018, on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana. It is scheduled to arrive at Mercury in late 2026 in several key arrival stages: i) September 03, 2026 – on approach to Mercury, the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) releases the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio); ii) November 21, 2026 – MPO and Mio, still joined together, are captured by Mercury's gravity into a polar orbit around the planet; iii) December 09-10, 2026 – MPO releases Mio onto its final elliptical polar orbit; iv) December 16, 2026 – MPO releases Mio's sunshield (MOSIF) and moves toward its final orbit; v) March 10, 2027 – MPO arrives in its final orbit; and vi) April 06, 2027 – begin science phase of the mission.

On its journey to Mercury, BepiColombo achieved several flybys of Earth (April 2020), Venus (October 2020, August 2021) and Mercury (October 2021, June 2022 and 2023, September and December 2024, January 2025).

BELA

The BepiColombo Laser Altimeter (BELA) is one of the most important and most sensitive experiments on board the MPO. The instrument was developed by an international consortium under the management of the University of Bern and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The aim of BELA is to measure the shape, topography and morphology of the surface of Mercury. This information will be used to create a digital terrain model that allows quantitative exploration of the geology, the tectonics, and the age of the planet's surface.

BELA was the first laser altimeter developed for a European space mission and is an integral part of a larger geodesy and geophysics package, incorporating radio science and stereo imaging.

STROFIO

STROFIO (sTart from a ROtating Field mass spectrOmeter) is an innovative mass spectrometer developed at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern, and is one of four sensors of the SERENA (Search for Exospheric Refilling and Emitted Natural Abundances) experiment on board the MPO. SERENA provides information on the whole surface-exosphere-magnetosphere system and the involved processes, plus the interaction between energetic particles, the solar wind, micrometeorites and the interplanetary medium.

STROFIO was specifically built for Mercury's thin atmosphere and for its measurement on the MPO's orbit, where it will in-situ record the density of low-energy neutral particles within the very thin atmospheres of Mercury (exosphere) and analyze its chemical composition.