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Juno Jupiter Probe Won't Move Into Shorter Orbit After All (space.com)
NASA announced today that their Juno spacecraft will not move into a closer orbit around Jupiter as originally planned. "Juno slipped into a highly elliptical, 53-Earth-day-long orbit around Jupiter when it arrived at the giant planet on July 4, 2016," reports Space.com. From their report: The probe was supposed to perform an engine burn in October to reduce its orbital period to 14 days, but an issue with two helium valves postponed that maneuver. The engine burn has now been canceled, meaning Juno will stay where it is through the end of its mission. "During a thorough review, we looked at multiple scenarios that would place Juno in a shorter-period orbit, but there was concern that another main engine burn could result in a less-than-desirable orbit," Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "The bottom line is, a burn represented a risk to completion of Juno's science objectives." But Juno should still be able to accomplish its mission goals in the longer orbit, NASA officials said. In fact, the 53-day path will allow the probe to perform some "bonus science" in the outer regions of Jupiter's magnetosphere, they added.
I hope they didn't permanent cancel it. Once the science objectives are completed, they should attempt this maneuver. Juno doesn't have a good imager, so closer the better. Would have been nice to get some 3D close ups of the clouds.
Voyagers and the like did way better in 1977.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I'll bet that kind of thinking is what got the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth alive. Doing more science instead of less is just a bonus.
That's not my department, says Werner Von Braun!
Well, by today's standards, yes. We were great until January 2017. . . then, we seem to have lost it.
So if they aren't going to be using the main engine for a major trajectory shift, does this mean that more fuel is available for the thrusters?
In my long (non) professional career of following of various space programs, it always seems that the limiting factors to a mission is 1) the availability of fuel for the thrusters (for minor course corrections, attitude control/dumping of momentum) and 2) how many reaction wheels are still working (although there have been creative solutions such as using sunlight pressure for attitude control). If Juno's thrusters same the same fuel (and fuel tank!) as the main engine then perhaps it now has access to a much larger supply and can conceivably last a long long time. :)
Of course, Juno's limiting factor WAS the intense radiation it was going to have to have faced but perhaps the new orbit has reduced that substantially. In fact, if there IS a lot more fuel available, perhaps it can use the fuel (once the primary mission is over) to get it out of the high radiation regions (perhaps by some creative gravity assists from the Galilean moons) and perform a multi-year "tour" of the Jovian system. This would possibly make up for the scientific tragedy that befell the Galileo probe when its high gain antennae didn't open and the data rate dropped by (three? more?) orders of magnitude. It'd be fantastic to get some really good pictures of Europa (life!) and Io (volcanoes!).
Or just put it in a relatively distant parking orbit around Jupiter and (because it's solar powered) let it monitor the Jovian system for (hopefully) decades
It's all as promised just that the hats got the spelling of "grate" wrong after Trump said it.
He's managed to piss off everyone except Russia already, so it's definitely grating on people.