Now that it is safely on its way around its first orbit, and NASA has turned its instruments back on, Juno turned around and snapped a new picture of Jupiter, catching three of its largest moons in the process. Rough cut (no reporter narration).
Advertisement
Watch It Again: NASA presents the Juno spacecraft’s view of its destination, taken throughout the month of June. Three of Jupiter’s four largest moons are visible in the photo: Io, Europa, and Ganymede. The current image was taken when Juno was around 4.3 million km from Jupiter.
Juno’s mission is scheduled to end in February 2018, and will culminate with an intentional death dive into the planet’s thick atmosphere.
The JunoCam camera aboard NASA’s Juno mission is operational and sending down data after the spacecraft’s arrival at Jupiter July 4. Juno then slowly started to turn on its instruments and the cam was finally powered up on June 10. Hansen also revealed that JunoCam will capture first high-resolution photos of Jupiter in August this year when it will be closer to Jupiter than it is today.
JunoCam is a color, visible light camera meant to capture images of the poles of Jupiter and cloud tops. “You can expect us to release some information about our findings around 1 September”, The Juno spacecraft was launched on 5 August in the year 2011, from Florida.
The San Diego-made camera aboard the Juno spacecraft survived in good working order when the satellite went into orbit around the gas giant on July 4th.
“We had to turn all our lovely instruments off to help ensure a successful Jupiter orbit insertion on July 4”, said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute.
Advertisement
Juno will now orbit Jupiter 37 times over the next 20 months, travelling 2,600 miles above the planet, which is around 3,000 miles closer to the surface than any other mission. The vast majority of these loops will take 14, not 53 days; Juno will perform a 22-minute engine burn on October 19 to shift into the two-week orbit. JunoCam was included on the spacecraft specifically for purposes of public engagement; although its images will be helpful to the science team, it is not considered one of the mission’s science instruments.
