This diagram shows the Juno spacecraft’s orbits, including its two long, stretched-out capture orbits. Now we’re there, and we’re concentrating on beginning dozens of flybys of Jupiter to get the science we’re after, ‘ said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator, based at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
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NASA’s Juno spacecraft is about to reach the farthest point in its orbit of Jupiter on Sunday, after five years of being launched to study the science of the biggest planet in the Solar System, with a mass two-and-a-half times of all the other planets combined.
Juno launched on August 5th, 2011. In the first week of July, Juno successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit and on July 31, it was at the farthest point in Jupiter’s orbit.
The Aug. 27 pass should return the first real scientific bounty of the mission, team members have said. As it approached Jupiter on July 4, it executed a 35-minute maneuver which allowed Jupiter’s gravitational field to capture the spacecraft into orbit.
Assuming the craft survives this orbit, a second capture orbit awaits before Juno settles in to a fourteen-day orbit from which all manner of observations will be conducted. The mission is scheduled to end in February 2018 with an intentional death dive into Jupiter’s thick atmosphere. The solar panels are placed on the three arms that radiate from the Juno spacecraft, each of them 30 feet or 9 meters long.
During Juno’s orbital insertion into Jupiter’s gravity all the science instruments were turned off the simplify the operations on the spacecraft during the important maneuver. During the encounter, Juno will skim past Jupiter at a mere 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) above the cloud tops. Juno’s position on July 31, 2016 is indicated at left. But during the close approach of the planet on August 27, all the instruments will be powered and collecting data as a trial run.
“We’re in an excellent state of health, with the solar-powered spacecraft and all the instruments fully checked out and ready for our first up-close look at Jupiter”, Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, said in a statement released Friday.
On its science mission, Juno will investigate Jupiter’s deep structure, atmospheric circulation and high-energy physics of its magnetic environment. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
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During its mission of exploration, Juno will circle Jupiter 37 times.
