Ahead of arrival on the solar system’s largest planet on July 4, a NASA spacecraft has now Jupiter more squarely in its sight.
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NASA’s Juno spacecraft is set to arrive at its destination on July 4th, at exactly 8:18 p.m PDT.
Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator, working with Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, the U.S. informed that this is the first of two such maneuvers which adjust the spacecraft’s orbit around the Sun and will fine tune its rendezvous with the giant gas sometime in July this year.
Juno’s maneuver adjustment began on February 3 at 10:38 a.m. PST (1:38 p.m. EST), where the spacecraft’s thrusters consumed about 1.3 pounds (0.6 kilograms) of fuel during the burn. Juno was around 51 million miles from Jupiter as well as roughly 425 million miles from Earth during the maneuver, according to NASA. Juno was launched in August 2011 and it is scheduled to orbit Jupiter 33 times.
Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Juno’s primary goal is to improve our understanding of Jupiter’s formation and evolution. During the flyby, Juno will investigate the cloud over Jupiter and analyze its aurorae to understand the Jovian world’s origin, structure, composition, atmosphere, and magnetosphere.
This adjustment changed the spacecraft’s speed by one foot (0.31 meters) per second. By the time it reaches Jupiter, it will have become just the eight spacecraft to have travelled more than 500 million miles from Earth, and the first to run on something other than nuclear power.
“Juno is all about pushing the edge of technology to help us learn about our origins”, Bolton said last month in a statement.
The maximum distance of the Juno spacecraft from the sun during its 16-month outer Solar System mission will be about 517 million miles or 832 million kilometers.
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A mission overview from NASA explains that Juno’s name comes from Roman and Greek mythology, in which “Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief”. The distance between the robotic spacecraft and its target was nearly 51 million miles. “It was Jupiter’s wife, the goddess Juno, who was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature”.
