AG百家乐在线官网

That brings to a close our live coverage of Juice's launch.

Everything has gone to plan, and the head of the space agency behind the mission has said he is "relieved and happy" (see our post at 14:45).

Juice is on its eight-year, solar-powered journey to Jupiter where it will assess the chance of life on three of the planet's icy moons.

"Rich data" will be sent back to Earth, should all go well, our science editor Tom Clarke has said - and the "wait will be worth it".

Scroll back through our blog to catch up on all the developments as they happened. 

The director general of the European Space Agency says he is "relieved and just so happy" as Juice officially makes its way to Jupiter.

Josef Aschbacher says: "I also feel very proud for Europe and everyone who has contributed.

He adds they are all asking themselves "is there a moon which could be habitable" uncovered on the mission.

He says he is in a "celebratory mood" after the solar panels began opening.

"There is still a long way to go" he adds, saying there is "still a lot of work to be done".

But the "most critical" steps have been carried out successfully.

A sign of relief for European Space Agency scientists everywhere... Juice has completed all its launch marks and is officially on its way to uncover the secret worlds around Jupiter. 

Following launch and separation from the Ariane 5 rocket, Juice sent a signal back to staff at the New Norcia ground station in Australia and deployed its huge solar arrays. 

The completion of this critical operation marked the launch a success. 

"ESA, with its international partners, is on its way to Jupiter," says ESA director general Josef Aschbacher.

"Together, we will keep pushing the boundaries of science and exploration in order to answer humankind's biggest questions." 

Over the next two and half weeks, Juice will deploy its various antennas and instrument booms that will study the environment of Jupiter and the subsurface of its three icy moons.

An eight-year cruise with four gravity-assist flybys at Earth and Venus will slingshot it towards the outer solar system.

The first flyby in April 2024 will mark a space exploration first: Juice will perform a lunar-Earth gravity-assist 鈥� a flyby of the moon followed by one of Earth.

Juice has started deploying its solar panels and is beginning to produce its own electricity.

The panels are some of the largest to have ever flown in an interplanetary mission. 

"This is a very exciting moment for us," a European Space Agency scientist says. 

Power on the satellite has already started to increase, and the mission is ready to fly to Jupiter. 

"Everything is going quite normally at this point," he adds. 

Every space launch is something of an engineering miracle, but Ariane 5 is relatively standard so far as rockets go.

Described by the ESA as "the workhorse" of its access to space, Ariane 5 is not to the level of NASA's record-breaking, multibillion-dollar Space Launch System powering the Artemis programme (a mission to return astronauts to the moon).

That said, Ariane 5 did carry NASA's James Webb Space Telescope into orbit in December 2021.

The ESA has launched more than 100 Ariane 5 rockets, and it will finally be retired next year. You can probably guess what its successor is called (Ariane 6).

Juice is pretty much top of the line so far as probes go - and it cost 拢1.4bn.

Much of that went towards making sure solar power can work in a section of space that enjoys only 3% of the illumination Earth gets from the sun.

Earth is about 93 million miles from the sun - Jupiter isn't far off 500 million.

Juice successfully took off at 1.14pm this afternoon, broadcast live by the European Space Agency.

A professor who has been involved in Juice's mission since 2008 has described the moment it successfully launched into space.

Professor Leigh N Fletcher, from the University of Leicester's school of physics and astronomy, said it was a "heart-stopping moment".

"My heart is still pounding, huge smiles around this room, and such an outburst of emotion after the disappointment of yesterday's delay," he said from the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. 

"None of us had much sleep, but the wait continues, as we hope for successful separation and that crucial solar array deployment.

"But what an amazing start to the journey to Jupiter." 

Teams on the ground have received a signal from Juice, indicating the spacecraft is now functioning as planned on its way to Jupiter. 

"Theses are the words that every spacecraft operations manager wants to hear," says Bruno Sousa, Juice's deputy flight director. 

"It's flowing into our systems, everybody's super excited... the spacecraft is alive." 

Teams will now start to check every subsystem on Juice, to make sure they are all healthy following the craft's separation from its transport rocket Ariane 5. 

The next milestone is for Juice to deploy its huge solar arrays. 

Juice has still not sent a signal back to European Space Agency staff back on Earth. 

It is not a cause for concern just yet, scientists have said, but it could be if a signal is not received in the next half hour. 

"We still don't have acquisition of signal yet," one ESA expert says, as he explains that the satellite needs to point in a certain direction to transmit one back. 

Juice is going through a tumbling effect at the moment, he says, and it needs to ensure the fuel can flow throughout it before it tries to find its own "orientation space". 

"There is always a certain uncertainty about when we'll actually receive the signal, but we have to be patient," he adds. 

"We have to keep looking, and I'm sure it will wake up soon." 

Juice's launch is all going to plan so far, but there are still a "couple of key stumbling blocks to go", our science and technology editor Tom Clarke says. 

He is at Imperial College London for the launch, where scientists who designed a key instrument on the rocket have gathered to watch their equipment head into space. 

Juice has successfully separated from Ariane 5 and is now going it alone, but another challenge is expected to come later today. 

"It is going to unfurl its vast 85sqm of solar panels that are going to give it the energy it needs way out 600 million miles from Earth where the sun's rays are a lot weaker," Clarke says. 

This is Europe's first mission to the gas giant, and it is hoping to gather some potentially ground-breaking information.  

Probes have gone to Jupiter before, Clarke says, "many of them "flyby missions, just taking a few photographs as they disappear around". 

"NASA has a Jupiter probe arriving at Jupiter quite shortly, slightly ahead of Juice, actually, but it has a slightly different objective. 

"No one sent this many scientific instruments out to the Jupiter system, and there's a huge array of science going into it.

"Rich data is going to come out of this for scientists to study for years to come."