On 22 July, ESA’s Juice spacecraft carried out the first of up to four ‘trajectory correction manoeuvres’ that will line it up for next month’s double lunar-Earth flyby.

We reported on this trajectory correction manoeuvre in a dedicated blog post.

Since then, Juice’s operators have been carrying out a full analysis of Juice’s new trajectory, further pinning down the spacecraft’s position in space. Their conclusion is that it is as good as could be.

This graphical representation of Juice’s trajectory was made by ESA’s Flight Dynamics team. It shows that on 16 July, before the trajectory correction manoeuvre, Juice was inside the dashed red circle at the upper right. The manoeuvre of 22 July aimed to place Juice within the second dashed red circle.

On 31 July, the Flight Dynamics team measured that Juice was within the yellow solid circle. This confirms that the manoeuvre went very well, and Juice is extremely close to the target position, shown by the black cross.

Indeed, the first trajectory correction manoeuvre went so well that a second possible manoeuvre pencilled in for 5 August to further fine-tune Juice’s approach is not needed.

The next possibilities for trajectory correction manoeuvres will be seven and three days before the Moon flyby.