{"id":19329,"date":"2016-07-01T19:19:06","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T11:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/juno-meets-jupiter-nasas-giant-mission-to-the-giant-planet-hits-its-climax-on-video\/"},"modified":"2016-07-01T19:19:06","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T11:19:06","slug":"juno-meets-jupiter-nasas-giant-mission-to-the-giant-planet-hits-its-climax-on-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/juno-meets-jupiter-nasas-giant-mission-to-the-giant-planet-hits-its-climax-on-video\/","title":{"rendered":"Juno meets Jupiter: NASA\u2019s giant mission to the giant planet hits its climax on video"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_258314\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-258314\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-258314\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/160701-juno-jupiter-630x525.jpg\" alt=\"Juno at Jupiter\" width=\"630\" height=\"525\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/160701-juno-jupiter-630x525.jpg 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/160701-juno-jupiter-768x640.jpg 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/160701-juno-jupiter-1240x1033.jpg 1240w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-258314\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An artist\u2019s conception shows NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter. (Credit: NASA \/ SwRI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Everything about NASA\u2019s Juno mission to Jupiter is big: the destination (giant planet, duh!), the cost ($1.1 billion), the travel time (five years to cruise 1.8 million miles), even the&nbsp;solar panels (totaling 635 square feet in area, about the size of&nbsp;a one-bedroom apartment).<\/p>\n<p>And one of the biggest things for us Earthlings&nbsp;is that you can use the small screen on your smartphone to watch the mission reach its climax while you\u2019re waiting for the Fourth of July fireworks to begin.<\/p>\n<p>NASA will be providing live video coverage of Juno\u2019s orbital insertion maneuver, starting at 7:30 p.m. PT Monday. Mission managers at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California expect to hear that the bus-sized spacecraft successfully executed Monday\u2019s&nbsp;key engine burn at 8:53 p.m. PT.<\/p>\n<p>If the engine firing&nbsp;goes wrong, the probe could zoom uselessly past Jupiter, or enter&nbsp;the wrong orbit around the planet. But a successful maneuver will&nbsp;set the stage for 20 months\u2019 worth of meticulously planned orbital observations.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Jupiter: Into the Unknown (NASA Juno Mission Trailer)\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/iNirssyUWkA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Juno and its scientific instruments are designed to study the giant planet\u2019s magnetic field, its flux of energetic particles, its auroras and&nbsp;its&nbsp;interior structure at close range. At its closest, the orbiter will pass within 3,100 miles of the cloud tops.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNASA has been to Jupiter before, but never this close,\u201d Diane Brown, NASA\u2019s Juno program executive, said Thursday at a news briefing.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the key difference between Juno and Galileo \u2013 NASA\u2019s other big mission to Jupiter, which orbited&nbsp;the planet and studied its moons from 1995 to 2003. The kinds of measurements that Juno is meant to provide are best&nbsp;done from deep within Jupiter\u2019s magnetosphere.<\/p>\n<p>Even during the approach, Juno\u2019s&nbsp;detectors have been tracking the \u201croar\u201d of radiation as the spacecraft plows through the magnetic field. Here\u2019s a video that&nbsp;converts the blasts of plasma waves into a horror-movie soundtrack:<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Juno Captures the &quot;Roar&quot; of Jupiter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8CT_txWEo5I?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Juno\u2019s microwave radiometers should&nbsp;be able to&nbsp;trace the presence of an exotic material known as liquid metallic hydrogen \u2013 and reveal&nbsp;whether Jupiter has a&nbsp;rocky&nbsp;core far beneath its clouds. The instruments can also analyze the&nbsp;composition of the Jovian atmosphere, keying in on the abundance of water and ammonia.<\/p>\n<p>All those readings will help&nbsp;flesh out the picture that scientists have of the solar system\u2019s creation more than 4.5 billion years ago. How did Jupiter and the other planets condense from the cloud of gas and dust that surrounded our infant sun? How prevalent were the chemicals that eventually gave rise to life on Earth? Those are the sorts of questions Juno\u2019s data could answer.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a camera aboard the spacecraft, of course. But because Juno orbits so close to Jupiter, don\u2019t expect the wide-angle shots of Jupiter and its moons that we saw during the Galileo mission. Instead, JunoCam will be sending back full-color, medium-resolution views of the giant planet\u2019s clouds.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cJunoCam is a unique element of the payload on this spacecraft, because from the outset, its reason for being on the payload was to do outreach to the public,\u201d JunoCam co-investigator Candy Hansen, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute, said in a video about the experiment. JunoCam\u2019s scientists will be working with amateur astronomers to decide where to point the camera.<\/p>\n<p>JunoCam isn\u2019t the mission\u2019s only public outreach angle: Three Lego figurines, representing Jupiter, Juno and Galileo, have been placed aboard the spacecraft just for fun. And Apple Music has teamed up with NASA to produce a music video celebrating the mission, titled \u201cVisions of Harmony.\u201d Apple is also offering a selection of songs with Juno&nbsp;connections in a \u201cDestination: Jupiter\u201d section of iTunes.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LcXDn7Hr2gM<\/p>\n<p>Spaceflight always presents challenges, but Juno is working under more than the usual share.<\/p>\n<p>When the spacecraft was being built, mission managers opted to go with solar power, rather than the more expensive and harder-to-acquire&nbsp;plutonium power packs that are typically used for probes heading to the outer solar system. That mean the folks who built the spacecraft at Lockheed Martin and Spectrolab (a Boeing subsidiary) had to push the envelope on solar-cell performance. Thanks to the probe\u2019s three 30-foot-long solar arrays, Juno is the farthest-out mission to rely on the sun rather than radioactivity for its energy.<\/p>\n<p>The other big challenge has to do with a different kind of radiation: the blast of energetic particles whipped up by Jupiter\u2019s magnetic field.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOver the life of the mission, Juno will be exposed to the equivalent of over 100 million dental X-rays,\u201d Rick Nybakken, Juno\u2019s project manager at JPL, said in a NASA mission preview. Juno is equipped with titanium shielding and radiation-hardened wiring to cope with the blast. But NASA doesn\u2019t&nbsp;expect the spacecraft to last much longer than the 20 months that have been planned for the primary mission.<\/p>\n<p>When Juno\u2019s work is done, the spacecraft will be programmed to plunge into Jupiter\u2019s clouds, setting off a final round of fireworks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An artist\u2019s conception shows NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter. (Credit: NASA \/ SwRI) Everything about NASA\u2019s Juno mission to Jupiter is big: the destination (giant planet, duh!), the cost ($1.1 billion), the travel time (five years to cruise 1.8 million miles), even the&nbsp;solar panels (totaling 635 square feet in area, about the size [&hellip;]<\/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":[5098,1606,190,4709],"class_list":["post-19329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-juno-mission","tag-jupiter","tag-nasa","tag-planets"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329"}],"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=19329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}