{"id":13743,"date":"2018-06-09T00:14:08","date_gmt":"2018-06-08T16:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasa-approves-three-year-extension-for-juno-mission-orbiting-jupiter\/"},"modified":"2018-06-09T00:14:08","modified_gmt":"2018-06-08T16:14:08","slug":"nasa-approves-three-year-extension-for-juno-mission-orbiting-jupiter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasa-approves-three-year-extension-for-juno-mission-orbiting-jupiter\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA approves three-year extension for Juno mission orbiting Jupiter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Artist\u2019s concept of the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA\u2019s robotic Juno spacecraft wil spend another three years probing the inside of Jupiter, giving the mission more time to meet its primary science objectives after concerns over the health of the probe\u2019s engine prevented it from dropping into a lower, shorter orbit around the solar system\u2019s biggest planet.<\/p>\n

The decision by NASA managers to extend the Juno mission was expected, after a review board in April determined that the spacecraft was returning valuable science data, with all its major systems and instruments working normally.<\/p>\n

The exception to Juno\u2019s favorable health report is the main engine, which managers elected not to use as intended in late 2016 to maneuver the spacecraft into a lower orbit that would have taken the orbiter once around Jupiter every 14 days. Instead, officials decided to keep Juno in an elongated 53-day orbit.<\/p>\n

The main engine successfully fired during Juno\u2019s orbit insertion burn around Jupiter on July 4, 2016, but engineers detected an issue with valves inside Juno\u2019s engine during a checkout before a follow-up burn a few months later intended to maneuver into the mission\u2019s final science orbit. Officials preferred not to risk a malfunction and canceled the engine burn, keeping Juno in its initial insertion orbit.<\/p>\n

That decision meant Juno needed more time to gather the mission\u2019s required science data. The spacecraft\u2019s instruments collect most of their data while passing close to planet once every 53 days, not the 14-day cadence originally planned.<\/p>\n

Scientists planned to have Juno complete 32 of the 14-day science orbits through February of this year, when its prime mission was scheduled to be over and ground controllers planned to intentionally crash the spacecraft into Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere, avoiding the possibility of contaminating one of Jupiter\u2019s potentially habitable moons.<\/p>\n

With the longer orbit, Juno has completed 12 science flybys to date, with the 13th close-up approach scheduled for July 16. It will take an extra three years to achieve all 32 science flybys.<\/p>\n

NASA has agreed to fund the Juno mission through fiscal year 2022, the agency announced Wednesday. Mission operations are set to end in July 2021, with continued data analysis through 2022.<\/p>\n

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Artist\u2019s illustration of the Juno spacecraft\u2019s elongated 53-day orbit around Jupiter. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWith these funds, not only can the Juno team continue to answer long-standing questions about Jupiter that first fueled this exciting mission, but they\u2019ll also investigate new scientific puzzles motivated by their discoveries thus far,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington. \u201cWith every additional orbit, both scientists and citizen scientists will help unveil new surprises about this distant world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is great news for planetary exploration as well as for the Juno team,\u201d said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno, from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. \u201cThese updated plans for Juno will allow it to complete its primary science goals.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a bonus, the larger orbits allow us to further explore the far reaches of the Jovian magnetosphere \u2014 the region of space dominated by Jupiter\u2019s magnetic field \u2014 including the far magnetotail, the southern magnetosphere, and the magnetospheric boundary region called the magnetopause,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cWe have also found Jupiter\u2019s radiation environment in this orbit to be less extreme than expected, which has been beneficial to not only our spacecraft, but our instruments and the continued quality of science data collected.\u201d<\/p>\n

One recent discovery by Juno showed that lightning in Jupiter\u2019s turbulent atmosphere is more common near the planet\u2019s poles, not at equatorial latitudes. On Earth, lightning in the tropics is more prevalent that at higher latitudes.<\/p>\n

In 1979, NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 spacecraft detected lightning in Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere via radio signals emitted by the electrical discharges. But the radio signals picked up by Voyager 1 did not match those emitted by lightning on Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the data from our first eight flybys, Juno\u2019s MWR (microwave radiometer) detected 377 lightning discharges,\u201d said Shannon Brown, a scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of a paper published Wednesday in Nature. \u201cThey were recorded in the megahertz as well as gigahertz range, which is what you can find with terrestrial lightning emissions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think the reason we are the only ones who can see it is because Juno is flying closer to the lighting than ever before, and we are searching at a radio frequency that passes easily through Jupiter\u2019s ionosphere,\u201d Brown said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Scientists think heat from the sun near Jupiter\u2019s equator warms the planet\u2019s swirling clouds just enough to inhibit convection. Most of Jupiter\u2019s heat, which drives the convection that produces lightning, is generated from within the planet, not from the sun, which delivers 25 times less energy to Jupiter than to Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cJupiter lightning distribution is inside out relative to Earth,\u201d said Brown. \u201cThere is a lot of activity near Jupiter\u2019s poles but none near the equator. You can ask anybody who lives in the tropics \u2014 this doesn\u2019t hold true for our planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This image of Jupiter\u2019s iconic Great Red Spot and surrounding turbulent zones was captured by NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft. Citizen scientists Gerald Eichst\u00e4dt and Se\u00e1n Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager captured April 1 during Juno\u2019s 12th science flyby of Jupiter. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/SwRI\/MSSS\/Gerald Eichstadt\/Sean Doran<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Other early results from Juno suggest Jupiter\u2019s interior is more complex than previously thought, with a larger, potentially dissolved core, and bands that extend deeper into the atmosphere than predicted.<\/p>\n

Many scientists thought Jupiter was \u201crelatively boring and uniform\u201d inside before Juno arrived, Bolton said in a science briefing last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor decades, scientists have assumed this, that if we drop below the cloud tops, below where the sunlight reaches, that pretty much Jupiter was all uniform inside, and it really didn\u2019t matter where you looked, it would all look the same,\u201d Bolton said last year. \u201cAnd what we\u2019re finding is anything but that is the truth. It\u2019s very different and very complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artist\u2019s concept of the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech NASA\u2019s robotic Juno spacecraft wil spend another three years probing the inside of Jupiter, giving the mission more time to meet its primary science objectives after concerns over the health of the probe\u2019s engine prevented it from dropping into a lower, shorter orbit around the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1183,1929,2522,1606,472,2020,1561,1563],"class_list":["post-13743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-jet-propulsion-laboratory","tag-juno","tag-junocam","tag-jupiter","tag-lockheed-martin","tag-new-frontiers","tag-planetary-science","tag-solar-system"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13743"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}