{"id":15276,"date":"2016-08-27T20:23:15","date_gmt":"2016-08-27T12:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/juno-gets-its-closest-look-at-jupiter\/"},"modified":"2016-08-27T20:23:15","modified_gmt":"2016-08-27T12:23:15","slug":"juno-gets-its-closest-look-at-jupiter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/juno-gets-its-closest-look-at-jupiter\/","title":{"rendered":"Juno gets its closest look at Jupiter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Updated with details from NASA press release.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Jupiter's
Jupiter\u2019s north polar region is coming into view as NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft approaches the giant planet. This view of Jupiter was taken on August 27, when Juno was 437,000 miles (703,000 kilometers) away.
Credits: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/SwRI\/MSSS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nearly two months after NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft slipped into orbit around Jupiter, the solar-powered probe made a passage 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) over the giant planet\u2019s colorful banded clouds Saturday, the closest planned encounter during its 20-month exploration of the solar system\u2019s largest world.<\/p>\n

Spinning on its axis once every 30 seconds, Juno swung by Jupiter at 9:44 a.m. EDT (1344 GMT), zoomed over its north pole, then raced north to south and crossed the planet\u2019s equator at a blistering speed of 130,000 mph (208,000 kilometers per hour).<\/p>\n

\u201cEarly post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders,\u201d said Rick Nybakken, Juno\u2019s project manager at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.<\/p>\n

Juno passed through this unexplored part of space hugging Jupiter\u2019s cloud tops once before, when the probe fired its main engine to brake into orbit July 4. But Saturday\u2019s flyby was the first time Juno will collect science data so close to the massive planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are getting some intriguing early data returns as we speak,\u201d said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. \u201cIt will take days for all the science data collected during the flyby to be downlinked and even more to begin to comprehend what Juno and Jupiter are trying to tell us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mission\u2019s prime objective is to study the history and evolution of Jupiter. Scientists want to know if the planet has a solid core and learn how Jupiter\u2019s powerful magnetic field is generated.<\/p>\n

Named for the wife of Jupiter in Roman mythology, a figure who could see through the cloak of clouds kept by the chief deity, Juno will reveal the gaseous world\u2019s poles in detail for the first time and peer beneath Jupiter\u2019s clouds with a microwave radiometer.<\/p>\n

Earlier missions left open questions about the inner workings of Jupiter, and instead focused on taking pictures and surveying the planet\u2019s many moons.<\/p>\n

Juno looped into a 53-day orbit July 4, and the mission\u2019s flight plan calls for the spacecraft to make two laps around Jupiter before another main engine burn Oct. 19 steers it into a tighter 14-day orbit for regular science observations.<\/p>\n

\"Artist's
Artist\u2019s concept of the Juno spacecraft at Jupiter. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Saturday\u2019s close approach, called a perijove, is a chance to see what awaits Juno on future flybys.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s sort of a toe dip operation,\u201d said Steve Levin, Juno\u2019s project scientist at JPL. \u201cWe\u2019re dipping our toes in the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ground controllers switched off all of Juno\u2019s science instruments for the craft\u2019s 35-minute main engine burn to enter orbit around Jupiter last month.<\/p>\n

In the weeks since Juno\u2019s July 4 arrival, scientists turned on the spacecraft\u2019s camera, spectrometers and detectors one-by-one to ready the probe for Saturday\u2019s encounter.<\/p>\n

Juno soared as far as 5 million miles (8.1 million kilometers) from Jupiter on July 31 \u2014 the apex of its current orbit \u2014 then the planet\u2019s strong gravity pulled the spacecraft back in for Saturday\u2019s high-speed flyby.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first time with our eyes open, so this is the time to really get excited,\u201d Levin said Aug. 11 in a presentation to NASA\u2019s Outer Planets Assessment Group. \u201cI know there was a lot of excitement about orbit insertion \u2026 But for this group, the time to be really excited is not July 4, it\u2019s Aug. 27.\u201d<\/p>\n

Juno will conduct 35 more close-up passes before a final approach ends with a commanded destructive dive into Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

All of the spacecraft\u2019s nine science instruments, comprising 29 individual sensors, were programmed to collect data Saturday, including JunoCam, a visible camera that was expected to capture the first close-up views of Jupiter\u2019s poles.<\/p>\n

NASA plans to release the highest-resolution images of Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere and the first direct snapshots of the planet\u2019s polar regions in the next couple of weeks, the space agency said in a statement Saturday. JunoCam has also recorded imagery of Jupiter for nearly a full orbit of the planet, and scientists will assemble the pictures into a time-lapse \u201cmarble movie\u201d showing its motion since early July.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in an orbit nobody has ever been in before, and these images give us a whole new perspective on this gas-giant world,\u201d Bolton said.<\/p>\n

\"This
This diagram of Juno\u2019s trajectory illustrates its current 53.5-day orbit, and the mission\u2019s planned 14-day science orbits scheduled to begin in October. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Detailed analysis of the data gathered Saturday will take months, and Levin said earlier this month that Juno\u2019s science team aims to release the initial results from the mission at the American Geophysical Union\u2019s Fall Meeting in December in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m anticipating there will be lots of great stuff,\u201d Levin said.<\/p>\n

Scientists originally planned for Juno to enter a longer 107-day path around Jupiter, then fire its engine again in October to immediately go into its 14-day orbit. Managers decided after Juno\u2019s launch to change the plan to divide the 107-day orbit into two 53.5-day orbits, giving scientists an early sneak peek at the conditions the spacecraft will encounter.<\/p>\n

Juno has a finite lifetime because it will go through Jupiter\u2019s intense radiation belts, running the risk of electronics damage caused by collisions charged particles encircling the planet. The mission is due to end in February 2018, but NASA officials may be able to grant a limited extension if Juno remains healthy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we looked at it, one of the conclusions we drew was we would really like to get a sense of what the environment is like, how the instruments are really going to work, and what surprises Jupiter is going to throw at us before we\u2019re on this two-week cadence, where we have a flyby every two weeks,\u201d Levin said.<\/p>\n

Once Juno starts circling Jupiter every two weeks Oct. 19, mission managers will have limited time to recover from technical problems that may crop up.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf something is really wrong, we have the option of delaying that (Oct. 19 maneuver) and take another 53 days before we go into the main mission,\u201d Levin said. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t want to do that for a variety of reasons. It costs money and things like that, but if there were really bad surprises, we have that option.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

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

Updated with details from NASA press release. Jupiter\u2019s north polar region is coming into view as NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft approaches the giant planet. This view of Jupiter was taken on August 27, when Juno was 437,000 miles (703,000 kilometers) away.Credits: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/SwRI\/MSSS Nearly two months after NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft slipped into orbit around Jupiter, the solar-powered […]<\/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":[1183,1929,1606,472,2020,1561,2612],"class_list":["post-15276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-jet-propulsion-laboratory","tag-juno","tag-jupiter","tag-lockheed-martin","tag-new-frontiers","tag-planetary-science","tag-swri"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15276"}],"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=15276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}