NASA Extends Juno Jupiter Mission By Three Years (gizmodo.com)

The Juno spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter was supposed to end its mission by crashing into the gas giant next month. Not anymore! From a report: It turns out the scientific mission will be extended through at least 2021 so it can meet its goals, as Business Insider first reported yesterday. This will delay the probe's dramatic demise for at least a few years. "NASA has approved Juno to continue through 2022 to finish all of our originally planned science," Scott Bolton, Juno's principle investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, told Gizmodo in an email. "The orbits are longer than planned, and that is why Juno needs more time to gather our planned scientific measurements." Juno departed Earth for Jupiter in 2011 and arrived at the gas giant on July 4, 2016. Since then, it's sent back a host of valuable data that has revealed new insights into Jupiter, like the depth of the red spot, three-dimensional views of the gas below its surface, and how its auroras work.

Comments

Re:Making up for lost time due to defects?

[Tablizer]

It seems little or no data was collected during a major portion of it's first orbit due to a software problem that escaped test,

Early in the mission, the engines failed fire to reduce the orbit size. Subsequent engine tests would interfere with and overlap with the optimum observation time point of the orbit so they had to choose between debugging the engine glitch OR observing Jupiter.

They decided to observe rather than tinker with the engine, in part because if the engine were bad, it could muck up the orbit further. Thus, the left the orbit larger than planned, and that's why they want more time to get the same number of close-passes as originally planned.