Watching Juno spacecraft in Jupiter's orbit was exciting

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Juno’s July 4 Jupiter arrival: What you need to know

On July 4th, NASA’s Juno spacecraft is scheduled to enter into orbit of the solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter, completing a near five-year journey toward the unknown – and embarking onto its next unprecedented mission.

Here, we break down everything you need to know about Juno’s journey so far, what’s going to happen on Monday and how this knowledge has the potential to change everything we understand about the solar system.

JUPITER IS NO JOKE:

Firstly, it’s important to understand the severity of Jupiter and just how (literally) massive this challenge is.

Jupiter is, by far, the largest planet in the solar system - so big you could fit over a thousand Earths inside it. It’s 300 times the mass of Earth and about two-thirds the size of all the planets in the solar system put together.

Jupiter’s high quantity of liquid metallic hydrogen means it is buried under the solar system’s largest magnetic field, with pressures up to 2 million times the pressure on Earth, and the most severe radiation environment of anybody in the solar system – other than the sun.

The background radiation we’re exposed to on Earth is about 0.39 of a RAD, while Juno is expected to experience about 20 million RAD over the course of its mission.

JUNO’S MISSION:

A mission of firsts, Juno is the fastest spacecraft to ever venture into the solar system, is the first space mission to operate a solar-powered spacecraft, will be the first to fly close to Jupiter and will be the first to orbit an outer-planet from pole to pole.

Launched on August 5, 2011, on a mission that cost $1.13 billion, Juno has had quite the journey so far.

It went in orbit around the sun at first, passed the orbit of Mars before a couple of main engine blasts fired the spacecraft back toward Earth where it got a gravity assist to set it on a 445 million mile course to Jupiter.

Juno will arrive at Jupiter on Monday, July 4th (for NASA), and the Jupiter Orbit Insertion burn begins at 8:18pm Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) and will last approximately 35 minutes.

When Juno has fulfilled its purpose, the spacecraft is scheduled to plunge itself into Jupiter’s atmosphere in February 2018.

JUNO’S JUPITER INSERTION:

The most dangerous part of the mission will be when Juno first enters Jupiter’s orbit, aka Jupiter Orbit Insertion.

Jupiter’s pressure is far too high to simply drop a probe on its surface, and so NASA’s plan is to thread a fine line by getting as close as possible to the planet, without getting sucked in by Jupiter’s magnetic field.

Juno will fly as close as 2,600 miles from Jupiter’s cloud tops, an area referred to as the “safe zone,” and then circle far away before coming back to loop around the planet again, a route that will take 14 days.

Juno will repeat that same loop every two weeks for about a year and a half until it has collected data from all over the entire planet.

Each time Juno flies close to Jupiter’s cloud tops it will turn on its measuring instruments to collect a range of data about the planet, including the highest-resolution images ever taken of Jupiter.

WHAT SCIENTISTS HOPE TO LEARN:

Jupiter is the first planet formed so any information learned from the Juno mission is going to shed light on the early history of the solar system in way they can’t learn from other planets.

Scientists hope to gain an understanding of how the solar system was born from analyzing Jupiter’s interior, and they also want to know things like how magnetic fields are generated by getting the first unobstructed view into Jupiter’s core.

WHEN AND WHERE CAN I WATCH?:

NASA TV coverage begins at 10:30pm Eastern Daylight Time follow link below to watch:

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ ... tml#public

Follow link below to Article and Diagrams:

https://www.rt.com/viral/349402-juno-ju ... insertion/

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Juno spacecraft: Nasa mission arrives at Jupiter – live

https://www.theguardian.com/science/liv ... piter-live

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21.02 second burn everything perfect

Juno now in Jupiter's orbit

Well worth watching

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‘Burn complete, orbit obtained’
Juno mission ready to unlock Jupiter’s secrets

After an almost five year journey, the US space agency’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft has arrived on Jupiter's doorstep and is "ready to unlock" all Jupiter's secrets.

Jubilant scientists in NASA control room rose to standing ovation when Juno was confirmed to have entered Jupiter's orbit after the burning of the engine.

Now the spacecraft is expected to have slowed down to 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second), positioning itself safely in the orbit and re-orienting toward the sun to recharge its batteries.

Engine burn complete and orbit obtained. I’m ready to unlock all your secrets, #Jupiter. Deal with it.
— NASA's Juno Mission (@NASAJuno)

Ahead of the final descent into Jupiter's orbit, scientists were on the edge of their seat hoping for Juno to complete the maneuver before it ran out of power. Once in orbit, Juno is to circle the planet 37 times over the next 20 months, flying some 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) from Jupiter’s surface.

"I'm really just nervous that the whole orbit insertion rocket burn is going to work enough to get us into orbit and then allow us to turn back to the sun before we run out of battery power," Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for Juno with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said at a news conference ahead of the historic moment.

NASA expects to receive first images via JunoCam from Jupiter in a few days, as the spacecraft awaits “downlink” windows a “handful of times” as it orbits the distant planet.

Juno was forced to shut down its cam five days prior to the arrival, but now scientists eagerly await the images, including the one of the "Great Red Spot" – a raging storm three and a half times the size of Earth located in Jupiter's southern hemisphere.

“What Juno's about is looking beneath that surface,” Bolton said. “We've got to go down and look at what's inside, see how it's built, how deep these features go, learn about its real secrets.”

According to Bolton, the team of scientists “just did the hardest thing NASA's ever done.”

Juno was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on August 5, 2011. The mission of the spacecraft is to study the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Scientist hope to shed light on how much water there is in Jupiter's atmosphere. Juno will also be instrumental in measuring the composition, temperature, cloud motions and other properties of the planet.

In addition to mapping out Jupiter's gravity fields, Juno will help study Jupiter's magnetosphere near the planet's poles, with a special focus on the auroras – northern and southern lights.

Juno is the second spacecraft to orbit Jupiter, following the Galileo probe which orbited the planet in 1995-2003.

The day on Jupiter is about 10 earth hours and its year is about 12 Earth years. Its effective temperature is some 112 C and surface gravity - approximately 2.5 times Earth's. Its mass is some 318 times that of Earth’s.

https://www.rt.com/usa/349497-nasa-juno-jupiter-orbit/