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NASA's Juno Blasts Off To Investigate Jupiter
coondoggie writes "NASA shot its 4-ton Juno spacecraft into the cosmos today with the ultimate goal of learning everything we can about the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter. Juno, once described as a flying armored tank, will take five years to reach its destination, slated to arrive at Jupiter in August 2016."
NASA has an explanation of the steps involved in getting Juno through the launch, and an animated film explaining the mission. The mission website has streaming video of Juno's progress, and NASA's press kit explains the goals and the spacecraft in detail (PDF).
If it wasn't in the cosmos until today, where was it?
One giant leap for LEGOkind.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/08/04/1420201/NASA-Sends-Lego-Figures-to-Jupiter
This is the first major mission to Jupiter since Galileo which was launched in 1989. Unlike Galileo this won't be focusing on the moons as much (which is sort of too bad since they are some of the most interesting things about Jupiter since they might harbor life.) Also, as TFA discusses, this has a lot of stuff to help deal with the high radiation which hasn't been used before. Seeing how exactly that technology works will help out a lot with future probes to high radiation or high magnetic field environments. One other nice thing about this is that we might get more information about the core which is currently hypothesized to be metalic hydrogen because the hydrogen is just under such high pressure that it becomes a solid, and that's freaking awesome.
Anonymous Coward gets lost in own navel!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Truly amazing that we, the only sentient life-forms we know of in the known universe, can conquer the nearly insurmountable forces and vastness of space, to discover the unknown. Restores my faith in humanity just a little bit!
I'm sure the ancient Roman goddess of the heavens just loves being called a flying armored tank.
It seems to be only (or mostly) Flash based crap.
It is cheaper that way, since a smaller rocket can be used when launching the probe at a slower speed. Also the Voyagers weighted only 722kg, while Juno weighs 3625kg. The higher mass decreases the speed, unless a much larger rocket is used.
Still, the way you put it, doesn't sound like a technological or engineering challenge, but mere budget. So I have to wonder how much costs would have to increase to get there in 1/4 of the time.
The Pioneers and Voyagers didn't have to stop. Juno's going into orbit, and that's easier if it's not zipping along at breakneck speed. Going into orbit is always much more difficult than flying by.
The Voyager probes only had to go about half way around the solar system before reaching Jupiter, and they basically traveled directly to each of the planets they visited. Voyager 1 went off into the void after its Jupiter flyby, while Voyager 2 used Jupiter and Saturn to slingshot itself toward Uranus and Neptune before leaving the solar system. In both cases, they were programmed to achieve solar escape velocity by the time their flybys were done, using however much fuel was necessary for the job.
In contrast, Juno is going to make one complete circuit around the Sun in an elliptical orbit that takes it out past Mars, it will fire its main rocket a couple of times out there to keep it on the right trajectory, then it'll fly past Earth again in about two years. It makes more than 1 and 1/2 laps around the solar system in total before reaching Jupiter, and it will be slowing down during most of the journey after the Earth flyby. Juno is far more massive than Voyager, and it is solar powered rather than using an RTG (as in Voyager and Pioneer), so they probably chose such a route partly to save on fuel and power.
Juno will go into a highly elliptical polar orbit around Jupiter (to avoid most of the radiation belts), which also requires a totally different route than one would take for any other "normal" type of orbit.
Juno, once described as a flying armored tank,
I just hope it doesn't crash-land back on earth. Steve Austin is getting way too old to fight shit like this.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.