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NASA's Juno Space Probe Enters Orbit Around Jupiter (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: NASA says it has received a signal from 540 million miles across the solar system, confirming its Juno spacecraft has successfully started orbiting Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. "Welcome to Jupiter!" flashed on screens at mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. The probe had to conduct a tricky maneuver to slow down enough to allow it to be pulled into orbit: It fired its main engine for 35 minutes, effectively hitting the brakes to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second). Juno was launched nearly five years ago on a mission to study Jupiter's composition and evolution. It's the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter since Galileo. The largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter is a huge ball of gas 11 times wider than Earth and 300 times more massive than our planet. Researchers think it was the first planet to form and that it holds clues to how the solar system evolved. Juno is a spinning, robotic probe as wide as a basketball court. It will circle Jupiter 37 times for 20 months, diving down to about 2,600 miles (4,100 kilometers) above the planet's dense clouds. The seven science instruments on board will study Jupiter's auroras and help scientists better understand the planet's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere. An onboard color camera called JunoCam will take "spectacular close-up, color images" of Jupiter, according to NASA. Juno launched from Cape Canaveral on August 5, 2011, which is some 445 million miles (716 million kilometers) away from Jupiter. Juno has however traveled a total distance of 1,740 million miles (2,800 million kilometers) to reach Jupiter as it had to make a flyby of Earth to help pick up speed. "After a 1.7 billion mile journey, we hit our burn targets within one second, on a target that was just tens of kilometers large," said Nybakken, Juno Project Manger. "That's how well the Juno spacecraft performed tonight."
Whoever modded the parent "-1 Offtopic", it's very much on topic - that's exactly what happened with the Rosetta mission to 67P/Churyumova-Gerasimenko.
-1 Flamebait, sure. But sadly on topic: The crew of the Juno mission all wear grey uniforms now, specifically designed to not risk offense to anyone.
No because this is a professional team that is wearing Polo shirts with the mission patch instead of being attention seekers. They realize they represent thousands of people that dedicated a decade of their lives to make this work.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/04/...
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Galileo, like Juno, was not built with sufficient planetary protection processes to ensure that it might not contaminate a place where life might be (e.g. Europa), so rather than leave it in orbit around Jupiter and have Europa run into it on some orbit, they deliberately dispose of it.
Adding the necessary planetary protection is a real cost and schedule burden, so if you can avoid it, you do.
Europa is a very good candidate for extraterrestrial life. It's got oceans of liquid water kept warm by the gravitational tug of Jupiter. If we send future space probes to Europa and find microbial life, it will quite possibly be the biggest discovery of the modern era. However, if Galileo crashed on Jupiter, there would have been a slight chance that microbes on the space probe could have contaminated the moon. We do everything we can to sterilize the probes, but microbes are very good at getting everywhere and hiding out. Some can even survive space's vacuum and intense radiation. If we do find life on Europa, we want to be 100% certain that it is Europa-originated life and not Earth life brought there by something we sent to the moon earlier.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The camera and the rest of the science payload were intentionally shut down a few days ago, so that they are best protected during orbit insertion and cannot interfere with that critical maneuver. They'll be brought back online in a couple of days, by which point Juno will be relatively far from Jupiter in its highly elliptical polar orbit. The first scientific pass isn't until August. In other words: there aren't really any stunning images expected anytime soon.
The camera on Juno is mostly there for public interest - it is not necessarily a prime science instrument. This is a significant difference between this mission and, say, Cassini and New Horizons, where getting map-quality visual data was a prime mission objective. Galileo served that purpose for the Jovian system, and Juno won't be making any close approaches to any moons in any case. The camera will be able to provide our first close-up views of the polar regions, and those images should look pretty great given how close Juno will be.
You can see the trajectory here: http://i.imgur.com/d3TiJAt.gif
Not really; Galileo's main antenna failed to open properly, greatly limiting practical bandwidth. Jupiter has yet to be visited by a photo-intensive mission.
For example, Galileo could not send frequent images of Jupiter's clouds so that weather changes could be monitored in detail for an (Earth) year or more. The other probes sent to Jupiter were merely flyby's (2 Pioneers, 2 Voyagers, 1 New Horizons).
But it appears they decided that studying the core (via gravity patterns) and polar radiation of Jupiter to be more scientifically useful at this time than general imaging. Hence Juno.
Juno's orbit is not well-suited for good imaging of the planet and its moons (except possibly the polar regions of Jupiter).
Maybe in the future, an image-intensive probe will be sent.
Table-ized A.I.