NASA's Juno Spacecraft Sends First Images From Jupiter (sciencedaily.com)

An anonymous reader writes: After its patriotic arrival at Jupiter on July 4th, the Juno spacecraft has sent its first images of the planet back to earth via the JunoCam. The visible-light camera aboard Juno was first turned on roughly six days ago after Juno placed itself into orbit. "This 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," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "We can't wait to see the first view of Jupiter's poles." The color image, which was obtained on July 10th when the spacecraft was 2.7 million miles from Jupiter, shows atmospheric features on Jupiter, including the famous Great Red Spot, and three of the massive planet's four largest moons -- Io, Europa and Ganymede. "JunoCam will continue to take images as we go around in this first orbit," said Candy Hansen, Juno co-investigator from the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona. "The first high-resolution images of the planet will be taken on August 27 when Juno makes its next close pass to Jupiter."

Comments

Re:That far?

[Tomahawk]

The orbit will eventually, after a couple of planned manoeuvres in the coming months, bring Juno as close at ~4500km from the surface of Jupitor. Currently the orbit brings Juno quite far from the planet, out beyond Callisto. Stage 1 was just to get Juno captured by Jupiter's gravity. We can expect better photos in the coming months when Juno gets closer.

Re:That far?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Juno's first pass around Jupiter, during which it just barely pushed itself into a highly elliptical orbit. It will continue travelling further from the planet until the end of the month, leaving plenty of time for equipment tests like this. The next engine burn to bring Juno into a closer orbit is scheduled for the 19th of October, two orbits from now.

Re:That far?

[Lord Crc]

Why would they perform a braking maneouver resulting in orbit outside Callisto?

Juno is planned to have a very elliptic orbit. It will go close to collect data, then move far away to have time to send the data back to earth. They want to spend as little time close to Jupiter as possible to minimize radiation damage.

Also, the larger apoapsis means they can expend less fuel when breaking. If you just want to be captured, you get as close as possible to the planet and break until you're just gravitationally bound, which will result in an orbit with a very large apoapsis and very small periapsis.

Re:labels

[hcs_$reboot]

Depends the time of the year, you may well read as well oi, aporue and edemynag..

Re:Navigation in space - how do they do it?

[Rei]

If you want to learn about spacecraft design, I strongly recommend "Space Mission and Analysis Design" by Larson and Wertz. It's sort of the "fundamentals" of all aspects of mission design, and they spend all of section 5 ("Space Mission Geometry") on the topic of the different coordinate systems used in celestial navigation, how to gather the data needed to position in them, how to convert from one to another, and what sort of hardware is needed, how to estimate pointing/positioning errors, etc.