Juno is named after the insightful wife of the Roman god Jupiter.
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The flyby, which is set to commence at 8:51 a.m. EDT on the 27th of August, will be the nearest of 35 close encounters now planned for the ambitious mission. It will edge the closest that it will get to the planet during its current mission, approaching at 2,600 miles above Jupiter’s roiling clouds while traveling 130,000 miles per hour. When Juno put itself into Jupiter’s orbit on the Fourth, NASA turned off the vehicle’s instruments to make sure nothing interfered with the insertion process. The probe launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on August 5, 2011, and having entered orbitaround Jupiter on July 4th of this year, will come closer to the planet than any spacecraft before it.
Illustration of NASA’s Juno spacecraft firing its main engine to slow down and go into orbit around Jupiter.
Principal investigator Dr Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, US, said: “This is the first time we will be close to Jupiter since we entered orbit on July 4”.
Mission controllers at the American space agency Nasa expect to capture stunning images and a wealth of scientific data.
At the end of its 20-month mission, Juno will follow in the footsteps of Galileo by making a one-way plunge into the planet’s thick atmosphere. Since then, we have checked Juno from stem to stern and back again.
These will include the highest resolution images of the Jovian atmosphere and the first images of Jupiter’s north and south poles.
Every one of Juno’s eight scientific instruments will be operational during the flyby, collecting a wide range of data that will allow scientists across the globe to beginunraveling the planet’s secrets.
“No other spacecraft has ever orbited Jupiter this closely, or over the poles in this fashion”, Steve Levin, Juno project scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in an announcement.
When the spacecraft reached Jupiter, all of its scientific instruments were shut down to ensure nothing interfered with the crucial braking manoeuvre needed to stop Juno from barrelling past the planet. All of these questions, it is hoped, are things the Juno mission will answer. Like the other gas giants, it was assembled during the early phases, before our Sun had the chance to absorb or blow away the light gases in the huge cloud from which both were born. These features will help researchers better understand how and when Jupiter formed.
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And this Saturday, the probe will be gathering what could prove to be the most crucial information its mission will produce. Godspeed, little Juno. You be careful out there!
