Tag: Jupiter

It’s not the closest close-up of Jupiter, but it’s the first view provided by NASA’s Juno probe since it went into orbit around the giant planet on July 4.

The image released today shows Jupiter and its Great Red Spot, as well as the moons Io, Europa and Ganymede, from a distance of 2.7 million miles. The picture was taken by Juno’s visible-light camera at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, shortly after it was turned on in the wake of orbital insertion. At the time, Juno was on the outbound leg of its initial 53.5-day capture orbit.

“The scene from JunoCam indicates it survived its first pass through Jupiter’s extreme radiation environment without any degradation and is ready to take on Jupiter,” Scott Bolton, mission principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in today’s image advisory. “We can’t wait to see the first view of Jupiter’s poles.”

JunoCam will continue to capture images as it zooms through its first orbit, but the first high-resolution pictures of Jupiter won’t be taken until Aug. 27, when Juno makes its next close encounter.

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NASA’s farthest-out solar-powered probe, the Juno spacecraft, successfully entered orbit around Jupiter tonight after a five-year, 1.8 billion-mile cruise through interplanetary space – and many hours’ worth of high tension back on Earth.

Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California had to program Juno’s computer in advance to execute a 35-minute rocket engine firing that put the probe in the correct orbit. If anything went wrong, Juno could have zoomed right past Jupiter, and flight controllers couldn’t have done anything about it.

It took 48 minutes for signals to travel from the spacecraft to Earth at the speed of light, which meant no one on Earth knew that the engine burn had even started until 13 minutes after it was over. Mission managers said the engine burn was just 1 second off what was planned.

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Everything about NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter is big: the destination (giant planet, duh!), the cost ($1.1 billion), the travel time (five years to cruise 1.8 million miles), even the solar panels (totaling 635 square feet in area, about the size of a one-bedroom apartment).

And one of the biggest things for us Earthlings is that you can use the small screen on your smartphone to watch the mission reach its climax while you’re waiting for the Fourth of July fireworks to begin.

NASA will be providing live video coverage of Juno’s orbital insertion maneuver, starting at 7:30 p.m. PT Monday. Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California expect to hear that the bus-sized spacecraft successfully executed Monday’s key engine burn at 8:53 p.m. PT.

If the engine firing goes wrong, the probe could zoom uselessly past Jupiter, or enter the wrong orbit around the planet. But a successful maneuver will set the stage for 20 months’ worth of meticulously planned orbital observations.

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