Juno Mission

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http://www.popsci.com/juno-mission-nasa-welcome-to-jupiter

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html

JUNO MISSION WILL PEER BENEATH JUPITER'S CLOUDS IN JULY
THIS SUMMER, THE JUNO MISSION WILL GIVE US OUR CLOSEST EVER LOOK AT THE STORMIEST PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
By Sarah Fecht  Posted Yesterday at 4:02pm

In Roman mythology, the lecherous god Jupiter is said to have drawn a veil of clouds around himself to hide his, ah, transgressions. Only the goddess Juno could peer through the clouds to learn what Jupiter was up to. In the same vein, NASA's Juno spacecraft will give us our first good look below Jupiter's thick shroud of clouds this summer. We probably won't find a philandering deity down there, but the findings are sure to be astounding.

Blanketed in one of the solar system's thickest blankets atmospheres and wrapped a belt of extreme radiation, Jupiter is not an easy planet to study. A few NASA missions have photographed the planet as they zipped past, but only one has orbited the stormy planet. The Galileo spacecraft circled Jupiter at a distance of about 20,500 miles. Juno, by comparison, will come within 3,000 miles of Jupiter, giving us our closest-ever views of the gas giant.

The $1.13 billion spacecraft will enter Jupiter's orbit on July 4, beginning a 20-month science mission that will explore how Jupiter formed, which tells us about how the solar system formed. That, in turn, tells us a bit about how humans came to be.

Why Jupiter Matters

The largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter could fit more than 1,300 Earths inside it. It has more mass than all other planets and asteroids in the solar system put together, says Scott Bolton, principal investigator on the Juno mission.
"After the sun formed, Jupiter got most of the leftovers," Bolton told Popular Science. "Earth is made out of the leftovers of the leftovers."

Thought to be the first object to form after the birth of our Sun 4.6 billion years ago, Jupiter has a composition very similar to the Sun's, except that the planet has more of the elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium. "The stuff that Jupiter has more of is what we're all made out of," says Bolton.

"We don't know how that enrichment happened or what the process was," he says. Whatever that process was, it "eventually led to not only the creation of the planets and the Earth, but even life itself. So what we're really trying to learn about is the recipe for solar systems. How do you make planets? Jupiter is a very important piece to that recipe because it represents the first step."

About Juno

Juno, which stands for JUpiter Near-polar Orbiter, launched from Earth in 2011.

On July 4, after firing its brakes for 35 minutes, Juno will catch up to Jupiter at a speed of 130,000 miles per hour, making it the fastest spacecraft ever to enter orbit around a planet.
During the arrival, the spacecraft will be 540 million miles from Earth. Since it will take communications signals 48 minutes to travel between Earth and Jupiter, the orbital insertion maneuver will be pre-programmed to proceed without human intervention.
Juno is equipped with three 30-foot-long solar panel arrays to power its 9 instruments, which will collect observations of Jupiter in the radio, microwave, infrared, visible, and ultraviolet wavelengths. It'll also study the Jovian world's magnetic field, which is 20,000 times as powerful as Earth's.

In addition to looking for clues about how Jupiter formed, Juno will find out whether Jupiter has a rocky core, search for water in the atmosphere, and profile the planet's winds, which can reach speeds of 425 miles per hour. It will also provide the highest-resolution images of Jupiter we've ever seen, and maybe solve some mysteries about the Great Red Spot--such as why it's shrinking and turning orange.
A harsh belt of radiation lies around Jupiter's equatorial regions, just waiting to damage a spacecraft's intricate electrical components. To avoid this area as much as possible, the Juno team will put the spacecraft in an elliptical orbit around Jupiter.



Juno will orbit Jupiter 37 times, traveling a total of 2.2 billion miles from its launch to its final resting place. At the end of its mission, NASA engineers will send the spacecraft plummeting into Jupiter, so as to avoid contaminating its potentially habitable moons with Earth microbes. The spacecraft will burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere.
That day will surely be a sad one, but it won't happen until November 2018. The spacecraft still has a long and science-filled life in front of it, beginning with its arrival at Jupiter on July 4.
We'll be covering Juno's arrival at Jupiter and more--keep an eye on http://www.popsci.com/tags/juno.

https://www.youtube.com/v/vJoWIEs6hNY

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This is good... 

https://www.youtube.com/v/A2fknqVk2yk

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http://www.popsci.com/how-juno-spacecraft-will-survive-jupiters-devastating-radiation

HOW THE JUNO SPACECRAFT WILL SURVIVE JUPITER'S DEVASTATING RADIATION
IT STARTS ORBITING THE DEADLY PLANET IN JULY
By Sarah Fecht  Posted June 24, 2016

Mighty Jupiter is incomprehensibly large. More massive than all the other planets and asteroids in the solar system combined, Jupiter is the size of 1,300 Earths. As if such a big guy needed any additional protection, Jupiter is also swathed in radiation that's many thousands of times harsher than around Earth.

"Jupiter is by far the most severe radiation environment of any body in the solar system, other than the Sun," says Kevin Rudolph, an engineer at Lockheed Martin who helped design and build the Juno spacecraft.
The Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter on July 4 and orbit it for two years. How will Juno survive such blistering radiation? "We're basically an armored tank," says Juno principle investigator Scott Bolton. "This mission is a first for NASA in many ways. It's probably one of the biggest challenges they've attempted, to get this close to Jupiter."

Where Does The Radiation Come From?

Jupiter's large metal core gives it a magnetic field 20,000 times larger than Earth's. And just like Earth's magnetic field, the Jovian magnetosphere traps the electrically charged particles that stream out from the sun.
The particles in the magnetosphere build up over time, and many become more dangerous. As the planet spins, the Jovian magnetic field whips around, too, accelerating all those charged protons and electrons that got caught in the magnetic net. They also take on more energy as they crash into other.

"You end up with essentially BBs," says Rudolph. But they're sub-atomic, so they can pass through a spacecraft's solid hull and spell trouble for a spacecraft's electronics.
"Those BB-like particles will fly into an electronic circuit and knock the atoms off the chip, or knock the electrons in the circuitry out of position. If they knock enough out, it can destroy the circuit."

An Armored Tank
1. Avoid the radiation

The first step to making sure Juno's circuitry doesn't get taken apart by radiation is to limit its exposure.
Jupiter's worst radiation is concentrated around its equatorial regions, so Juno's elliptical orbit will make sure it flies through those areas as little as possible.

"The orbits that we have go far away from Jupiter over most of the orbit," says Rudolph, "and when they come in close, they dive quickly through the intense part, then fly below the radiation and go back out quickly."
"We thread a needle," says Bolton. "By going over the poles we're able to drop down in a small gap between the atmosphere and these intense radiation belts."

2. Radiation hardening

Lockheed Martin based Juno's design on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But radiation levels around Mars are much lower than at Jupiter, so the Juno team had to make some adaptations.
The engineers wrapped many of the components of Juno's avionics systems in a thin layer of lead shielding, which is dense enough that the particles have trouble penetrating.
They also made some of the electronic parts larger, to lessen the impact of each radiation hit. For example, Rudolph says, if a transistor only has five atoms in it and radiation knocks away one of those atoms, then it would have lost 20 percent of its functionality. But if the transistor has 500 atoms in it, than a radiation hit only knocks out 0.2 percent of it.
"If it's bigger, it's more robust against radiation," says Rudolph.

This kind of radiation hardening makes the spacecraft able to survive a radiation dose of 50,000 rems. But that's still a far cry from the 20 million rems that Juno will be exposed to over its lifetime. To make it even hardier, they needed to build a special box.

3. A radiation-proof vault

Most of Juno's electronics are secreted away inside a cube that measures about 3 feet on each side. The "vault" is made built from half-inch-thick titanium that will stop or slow down those fast-moving charged particles before they can smash into Juno's delicate parts.
Of course, Juno's solar panels and cameras won't do much good if they're locked inside a dark box. Those and other sensors are left outside the vault, with cables connecting them to the circuitry inside the vault.
Those external parts have added protections. For example, the camera that looks at the stars to help the spacecraft orient itself is wrapped in an inch-thick canister, with just one end open.
The solar panel arrays have a 12-millimeter-thick sheet of glass over the top. The glass lets in light so the solar panels can do their jobs, but it also provides a small amount of protection against radiation and damaging dust particles.

4. Overcompensating

To see how radiation would affect Juno's solar panels, engineers put the cells in what Rudolph describes as a "hot dog"-shaped chamber that fires electrons at the cells.
Those experiments showed that the solar cells would lose 10 to 15 percent of their output over the life of the mission. So to compensate, the team just made the panels 10 to 15 percent bigger. That way, Juno will still have enough power to take photos and measurements even when its near the end of its mission.

Overall, Juno is designed to take twice as much radiation than scientists expect it to have to deal with. Its total radiation tolerance of 40 million rems gives a little room for error, in case the radiation levels are higher than expected, and should also leave open the possibility for a mission extension beyond November 2018.

Paving The Way To Europa

Juno's radiation-protected sensors show us Jupiter in greater detail than ever before. The mission could help to uncover how Jupiter formed, in turn shedding light on how the solar system, and maybe even life itself, came to be.
NASA is also seriously considering a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, which scientists consider to be one of the most likely spots to find alien life in our solar system. Because Europa orbits in Jupiter's severe radiation belt, Juno's design could help shape the spacecraft that eventually go there.
"Europa's radiation dose is much worse than the dose that we're getting from Jupiter," says Rudolph. "They're going to have to come up with some nifty stuff, and I'm sure NASA will take lessons from this mission."

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http://www.space.com/33275-one-week-juno-arrives-at-jupiter.html

One-Week Countdown Begins for Juno Mission's Daring Arrival at Jupiter
By Calla Cofield, Space.com Staff Writer | June 27, 2016 06:53am ET

NASA's Juno probe is only one week away from its arrival at Jupiter, where it will execute a daring maneuver in order to get closer to the giant planet than any other spacecraft in history.

Getting up-close and personal with Jupiter is a serious challenge for space probes, because the Jovian giant is surrounded by a belt of very intense radiation that can quickly fry most spacecraft electronics. So rather than orbiting the planet, Juno will make a series of 37 loops between Jupiter and the radiation ring.

On July 4, Juno's engines will burn for about 35 minutes to slow down the probe so it can enter into its loopy orbit in the Jupiter system. But if the maneuver doesn't go as planned, Juno could fly right past Jupiter, putting an end to the $1.1 billion mission.

Getting to know Jupiter

The primary science objective of the Juno mission is to collect information about Jupiter's interior, which will provide clues about how the planet formed. That, in turn, could provide information about the history of the entire solar system, and about the formation history of other solar systems in the universe.

"We think that giant planets like Jupiter are the cornerstones of planet formation," reads a section of the Juno mission website. "These planets were assembled early in the process, before their young stars had the chance to absorb or blow away the light gases in the huge cloud from which they were born. Giant planets also play a big role in planet formation because their huge masses allow them to shape the orbits of other objects in their planetary systems, such as other planets, asteroids, and comets."

As Juno skims through the area between Jupiter and the radiation belt, it will take precise measurements of Jupiter's gravity and magnetic field. The strength of a planet's gravity can help reveal its precise mass, and a planet's magnetic field hints at its composition. All of that information can help scientists learn about a planet's history, and Juno scientists hope to answer questions about when Jupiter formed, and if it has always been orbiting the sun in about the same place.

"Competing formation theories make different predictions about the content and mass of Jupiter's core, so measuring the core will allow us to eliminate ideas that are wrong," the Juno website reads.

Juno will also send back a few dazzling snapshots of Jupiter. It is equipped with cameras to image the giant planet in visible light, as well as in infrared and ultraviolet light. The latter two instruments, along with other instruments on Juno, will be used to study the composition of Jupiter's atmosphere; scientists are particularly interested in the water content of the planet's atmosphere.

"Determining the amount of water — and therefore oxygen — in the gas giant is important not only for understanding how the planet formed, but also how heavy elements were transferred across the solar system," the mission website says. "These heavy elements were crucial for the existence of rocky planets like Earth — and life. Since Jupiter is the best example of a gas giant that we have, learning its history will help us understand the hundreds of giant planets we've discovered orbiting other stars."

The science instruments are tucked away inside a 400-pound (180 kilogram) titanium vault that will protect them from the radiation around Jupiter. Eventually the probe will make tight, 14-day-long orbits through the system, and get as close as 2,700 miles (4,350 kilometers) to Jupiter's cloud tops.

But that's only if the July 4 arrival goes as planned. By the time Juno reaches Jupiter, it will be traveling faster than any human-made object has ever gone — more than 40 miles per second (64.3 km/s), which is 144,000 miles per hour (231745.536 km/h), according to NASA officials. To slow down and enter into orbit near Jupiter, "Juno's engines need to fire at just the right moment and in just the right direction for just the right amount of time," according to the mission website.

"It's a one-shot deal. I mean, the whole thing's riding on this JOI — Jupiter orbit insertion — activity on July 4," Scott Bolton, Juno's principle investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a news conference on June 16. "Somebody asked, 'When does the nail biting start?' It's already started."

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If orbit doesnt work, the mission is truly lost because Juno is using a special solar cell/battery combination that removed the need of a RTG.

This will be the deepest venture into space on a solar powered vehicle. Jupiter only gets about 4% of the solar energy the Earth does, so the cells have to be exceptionally efficient.

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It is an odd polar elliptical orbit to avoid the main radiation exposure... it will be quite a feather in their cap to attain orbit and survive the entire mission length...   

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https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-juno-spacecraft-to-kick-into-planned-autopilot-for-july-4-jupiter-burn

June 30, 2016
NASA's Juno Spacecraft to Kick into Planned Autopilot for July 4 Jupiter Burn

At about 12:15 pm PDT today (3:15 p.m. EDT), mission controllers will transmit command product "ji4040" into deep space, to transition the solar-powered Juno spacecraft into autopilot. It will take nearly 48 minutes for the signal to cover the 534-million-mile (860-million-kilometer) distance between the Deep Space Network Antenna in Goldstone, California, to the Juno spacecraft. While sequence ji4040 is only one of four command products sent up to the spacecraft that day, it holds a special place in the hearts of the Juno mission team.

"Ji4040 contains the command that starts the Jupiter Orbit insertion sequence," said Ed Hirst, mission manager of Juno from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "As soon as it initiates -- which should be in less than a second -- Juno will send us data that the command sequence has started."

When the sequence kicks in, the spacecraft will begin running the software program tailored to carry the solar-powered, basketball court-sized spacecraft through the 35-minute burn that will place it in orbit around Jupiter.

"After the sequence executes, Juno is on autopilot," said Hirst. "But that doesn't mean we get to go home.  We are monitoring the spacecraft's activities 24/7 and will do so until well after we are in orbit."

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/juno-arrives-at-jupiter1/

Juno Arrives at Jupiter
After a do-or-die engine burn, the second spacecraft ever to orbit Jupiter is preparing to revolutionize our view of the giant planet
By George Musser on July 4, 2016

PASADENA, Calif.—NASA's Juno spacecraft has successfully entered orbit around Jupiter. At 8:53 p.m. Pacific time, ground controllers received a telemetry tone of 2327 Hz—equivalent to the highest D note on a piano keyboard—indicating that Juno's 35-minute engine burn had slowed the spacecraft enough to slip into the giant planet's gravitational embrace. Launched in 2011 on a nearly five-year interplanetary voyage, Juno is only the second spacecraft to ever orbit Jupiter, after the Galileo mission that explored the giant planet from 1995 to 2003. During its capture into orbit Juno passed just 4,490 kilometers above the Jovian cloudtops, so close that the planet filled half its sky. Even so, Jupiter is so immense that an astronaut riding along would have seen only about five percent of the planet's cloud-shrouded face.
At 9:50 p.m., the maneuver was officially complete as the spacecraft turned its solar arrays back toward the sun. "I won't exhale until we're sun-pointed again," Juno's principal investigator Scott Bolton had said at a press conference earlier in the day.

The spacecraft plummeted in from interplanetary space over Jupiter's north pole at about 7:30 p.m. Pacific time, falling ever faster as it plunged deeper into the planet's gravitational field. Just two days ago its speed relative to Jupiter was nine kilometers per second; midday yesterday, 12 kilometers per second; and by the rocket burn, 54 kilometers per second. The burn reduced its speed by just one percent, but that was enough. (Theoretically, the spacecraft was captured by the planet at 8:38 p.m., about halfway through the burn, but confirmation did not come until later.) After skimming so close to Jupiter's upper atmosphere, the spacecraft soared back up from the planet's cloud tops at about 9:30 p.m. into a looping, elongated orbit out to 8.1 million kilometers.

Were it not for Juno's engine burn, Jupiter's gravitational field would have spat the spacecraft back into the depths of interplanetary space at nearly the same speed as its approach. Far from attempting to reassure the public that such an eventuality would never come to pass, scientists and engineers spent the day warning journalists about it. "Juno is going into the scariest part of the scariest place," Heidi Becker of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who leads the radiation-monitoring team, said during a press conference earlier Monday. The gauntlet Juno ran at Jupiter held many chances for catastrophe: The spacecraft might have been knocked out by intense magnetic fields (at that distance, 20 times stronger than Earth's), ionizing radiation (a total dose of 265 rads—more than enough to kill a human being), dust particles from Jupiter's rings (from which the main engine was completely unshielded), or loss of power if the solar arrays were unable to reorient to the sun.

Now, before Juno can resume high-speed communications through its main antenna, controllers must perfect its alignment with Earth and dampen any wobbling motion, first by firing thrusters, then by warping the solar panels slightly to fine-tune the spacecraft's orientation. After putting all the scientific instruments into precautionary hibernation last week, the mission controllers are preparing to power them back up on Wednesday. Even then, though, scientists don't expect any decent images or dramatic findings until August 27, when the spacecraft rounds its first orbit and swoops close to the planet again. (Officially, an orbit starts when the spacecraft reaches its farthest distance, or "apojove," which it does for the first time on July 27. So the next closest approach will be considered halfway through the first orbit.)

The next nail-biting moment will come on October 19, when the main engine is scheduled to fire for a final time, placing the spacecraft into a 14-day mapping orbit. If that goes well, scientists can at last stop fretting about specific milestones and instead lose sleep over Juno's escalating radiation dose. Initially the dose is minimized by the spacecraft's polar orbit, which ducks under the radiation belt, but the orbit shifts over time due to the torquing from Jupiter's gravitational field. As its orbit shifts, Juno will approach the planet at a steepening angle, passing through more intense regions of radiation and increasing its exposure tenfold. Despite being shielded in a titanium vault, the spacecraft's instruments will be gradually cooked. For now, Juno has escaped ending with a bang, but it cannot avoid going out with a whimper.

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Here is a brief description of the sensors and experiments aboard Juno...  The videos are only 90 seconds long...

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-nine-space-gadgets-nasas-juno-is-using-to-study-jupiter

The Nine Space Gadgets NASA's Juno Orbiter Is Using to Study Jupiter

Written by
BECKY FERREIRA
CONTRIBUTOR
July 5, 2016 // 01:48 PM EST

In the midst of Independence Day festivities, NASA's Juno orbiter celebrated its own American heritage with a daredevil maneuver. Mission scientists anxiously watched as the $1.1 billion spacecraft delicately edged itself into the gravitational embrace of Jupiter and successfully parked in orbit around this behemoth world, which is by far the largest planetary body in the solar system.

"This is the one time I don't mind being stuck in a windowless room on the night of the 4th of July," Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator, said in a NASA statement. "The mission team did great. The spacecraft did great. We are looking great. It's a great day."

After five years of spaceflight and over a decade of preparation, Juno has at last reached its target. It is only the second orbiter in history to visit Jupiter after the Galileo spacecraft, which studied the planet from 1995 to 2003.

For the next three months, the Juno team will be focused on calibrating the spacecraft's equipment, before conducting another orbital maneuver on October 19. This burn will send Juno into a highly elliptical polar orbit around Jupiter, and that's when the real mission science will begin.

Judging by its sophisticated onboard toolkit, it will be well worth the wait, because Juno is decked out with all kinds of fancy gadgets. Here's the rundown of the new orbiter's specs:

JunoCam (JCM)

https://www.youtube.com/v/5dQeMwRSKkk

The law of "pics or it didn't happen" certainly applies with Juno's trip to Jupiter, hence the inclusion of JunoCam as part of the orbiter's payload. In addition to providing close-up optical snapshots of Jupiter's swirling cloud systems and mysterious poles, the camera is a great example of a project that uses its own limitations as an opportunity for creative solutions.

"We do not have enough data volume to take a picture on every spin," explained Cathy Hansen, the co-investigator of JunoCam, in a NASA video. "We are going to have to be choosy."

For the JunoCam team, that means inviting amateur astronomers to share their own observations and recommendations for what Jovian regions to photograph. There is even an online voting system for people who'd like to back particular points of interest.

"JunoCam is a unique element on the payload of this spacecraft, because from the outset its reason for being on the payload was to do outreach to the public," Hansen said.

Magnetometer (MAG)

https://www.youtube.com/v/380ru2apTYU

Jupiter has long been known to rock an absolutely intense and expansive magnetic field. In fact, the Jovian magnetosphere is the largest planetary structure in the solar system by volume, extending 75 times beyond the reaches of the planet itself.

A phenomenon as thoroughly epic as this sprawling magnetosphere clearly warrants its own instrument. As a result, Juno is equipped with a sophisticated magnetometer consisting of two main components: The Fluxgate Magnetometer (FGM), which will map out the direction and strength of Jupiter's magnetic field lines, and the Advanced Stellar Compass (ASC), a star-tracking navigational system that will precisely orient Juno in space. Both are placed at the end of a 12-foot-long boom that extends from Juno's main body.

"The primary purpose for our investigation is to map the magnetic field of Jupiter very accurately and try to understand how it's generated in Jupiter's electrically conducting core," said Jack Connerney, the co-investigator of the MAG instrument.

Gravity Science (GS)

https://www.youtube.com/v/ulzq_mlU-fA

One of the most fascinating and outstanding mysteries about Jupiter is whether it has a solid core, or if it boils down to a compressed gas center. Juno will set about resolving this question by taking minute measurements of the planet's gravitational field, which will in turn shed light on the mass distribution that remains hidden under Jupiter's thick cloud cover.

As it orbits the planet, Juno will send radio signals to and from a 34-meter-wide radio antenna based at the Deep Space Network in Goldstone, California. Using the Doppler effect, the GS team will measure minor gravitational distortions in this radio relay to unpack density variations within the planet.

Microwave Radiometer (MWR)

https://www.youtube.com/v/iakQRb3e0Zg

Jupiter is a massive ball of deadly radiation, which is why Juno's sensitive electronics have to be locked up in a vault behind thick, titanium walls. But for the six antennae that constitute the Microwave Radiometer instrument, confronting the planet's complex radiation output is the objective.

Mounted on two external flanks of the orbiter, MWR is designed to pick up six microwave frequencies. Each will reveal insights about the temperature, conditions, and water content of Jupiter's atmosphere at different depths within the planet. The radiometer is expected to pick up signals tucked away as deep as 600 kilometers (372 miles) under Jupiter's surface, providing an unprecedented glimpse of the tumultuous vistas beneath Jupiter's clouds.

Radio and Plasma Wave Sensor (WAVES)

https://www.youtube.com/v/dNeDdLY9EaY

Designed to root out radio and plasma waves in Jupiter's atmosphere, Juno's WAVES instrument consists of a classic rabbit-ear-style antenna for picking up electric emissions, along with a wire coil for fluctuating magnetic waves.

The main goal for the WAVES team is to clarify the ways in which Jupiter's atmosphere interacts with its magnetic and electric fields, especially at the poles. But the instrument has also already proved to be a popular favorite after it picked up this eerie "roar" of the planet's magnetosphere a few weeks back. Needless to say, it will be interesting to see what else WAVES finds.

https://www.youtube.com/v/8CT_txWEo5I

Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVS)

https://www.youtube.com/v/X45BbGHw6IM

The Northern and Southern lights attract crowds of spectators at Earth's poles, but they have nothing on the spectacular auroras of Jupiter. To study these dazzling light shows, some of which exceed our planet in size, Juno is outfitted with an Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph that can monitor auroras across several ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths.

"It's much easier to look at [auroras] in ultraviolet wavelengths because we can see it on the day side as well," said UVS co-investigator Randy Gladstone. "When we see light from those different colors in the UV, they tell us different things about Jupiter's upper atmosphere and the particles that are causing the auroras to happen."

Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM)

https://www.youtube.com/v/bXXodwydrEA

Jupiter's auroras and hotspots will also be monitored by the Italian-made JIRAM instrument, which will capture infrared images as a counterpoint to the ultraviolet pictures.

Jovian Auroral Distribution Experiment (JADE)

https://www.youtube.com/v/HItyjQYWB8s

A particle detector called JADE is designed to scope out electron and ions within Jupiter's auroras. While UVS and JIRAM will provide images of auroral activity across several wavelengths, JADE is focused on accurately detecting the very particles that generate these ribbons of light across the planet.

The experiment consists of three electron sensors located on different sides of Juno, along with one ion sensor, which are designed to pick up the signatures of lower energy particles emitting around 30 kiloelectron volts.

Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument (JEDI)

https://www.youtube.com/v/i1eFauZuJxg

Barry Mauk, the team leader for Juno's JEDI instrument, admits that his project's acronym is a little bit "forced," but it was too good to resist for obvious reasons. And indeed, much like Jedi knights, this puck-sized detector is capable of sensing an underlying order of tiny structures in the universe, though its focus is on Jupiter's charged particles, not midichlorians (apologies for the reminder that midichlorians are a thing).

A companion to the JADE instrument, JEDI is designed to measure high energy particles ranging from 30 to 1,000,000 kiloelectron volts, which will fill out our understanding of Jupiter's magnetic and radiation environment.

"Jupiter has the most intense and interesting radiation belts," Mauk said. "It's a rotationally dominated space environment, or magnetosphere, where Earth is a solar-wind-driven space environment. By studying two different environments that are powered by different things, you can begin to isolate the physical processes that are causing these variations."

"We hope to make great discoveries there."

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Mission Status Report

The engineers and scientists working on NASA's Juno mission have been busying themselves, getting their newly arrived Jupiter orbiter ready for operations around the largest planetary inhabitant in the solar system. Juno successfully entered Jupiter's orbit during a 35-minute engine burn on Monday, July 4. Confirmation that the burn had completed was received on Earth at 8:53 pm. PDT (11:53 p.m. EDT) that evening.

As planned, the spacecraft returned to high-rate communications on July 5 and powered up five of its science instruments on July 6. Per the mission plan, the remaining science instruments will be powered up before the end of the month. Juno's science instruments had been turned off in the days leading up to Jupiter orbit insertion.

The Juno team has scheduled a short trajectory correction maneuver on July 13 to refine the orbit around Jupiter.

"Prior to launch five years ago we planned a date and time for the Jupiter orbit insertion burn and the team nailed it," said Rick Nybakken, project manager for Juno from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We are in our planned 53.4 day orbit. Now we are focusing on preparing for our fourth and final main engine burn, which will put us in our 14-day science orbit on October 19."

The next time Juno's orbit carries it close by the planet will be on Aug. 27. The flyby is expected to provide some preliminary science data.

"We had to turn all our beautiful instruments off to help ensure a successful Jupiter orbit insertion on July 4," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "But next time around we will have our eyes and ears open. You can expect us to release some information about our findings around September 1."

The Juno spacecraft launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

More information on the Juno mission is available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/juno

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-s-juno-transmits-first-close-look-at-jupiter/

NASA's Juno Transmits First Close Look at Jupiter
The spacecraft's closest-ever swoop over Jupiter's clouds offers a new view of the giant planet's north pole
By Hanneke Weitering, SPACE.com on August 29, 2016

NASA's Juno spacecraft whizzed by Jupiter on Saturday (Aug. 27), successfully completing the first—and closest—of 36 orbital flybys planned for the duration of the probe's mission.

Juno arrived at Jupiter July 4 after a five-year journey, and this will be the closest approach of the entire mission, with the spacecraft grazing over the tops of Jupiter's clouds at a distance of just 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) at a speed of 130,000 mph (208,000 km/h).

During this encounter, Juno had every single one of its science instruments up and running for the first time in the mission. But it will be some time before most of the data and images from the flyby will be available to the public, researchers said.

"We are getting some intriguing early data returns as we speak," Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement. "It 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."

The first flyby data to be released will be high-resolution photographs from JunoCam, the spacecraft's visible-light camera. NASA will likely release those photos in the next couple of weeks. Images from JunoCam will offer the closest and most detailed views of Jupiter's atmosphere, NASA officials said.

"We are in an orbit nobody has ever been in before, and these images give us a whole new perspective on this gas-giant world," Bolton said.
Juno will continue to collect data on Jupiter's atmosphere, weather, magnetic fields and formation history until 2018. Then, the spacecraft is scheduled to plunge to its death into Jupiter's atmosphere, taking measurements all the while. But NASA says scientists will have enough data about Jupiter to study the gas giant for for years to come.

[Jason]

Can't wait!

[BridgeTroll]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jupiter-mission-s-computer-glitch-delays-data-gathering/

Jupiter Mission's Computer Glitch Delays Data-Gathering
Juno probe goes into safe mode hours before second flyby of the giant planet

NASA's Juno spacecraft put itself into a temporary shutdown at 10:47 p.m. US Pacific Daylight time on October 18 as it approached a fly-by of Jupiter. It was the mission's second glitch in a week, following a problem with its propellant system.
Juno remains safe and is looping around Jupiter on a 53.5-day elliptical orbit. But the spacecraft did not gather scientific data as it whizzed 5,000 kilometres above the giant planet's cloudtops on this, its second close pass since arriving at Jupiter on July 4.
"We'll just hang out for a couple of days while we figure out what went wrong," says Scott Bolton, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and the mission's principal investigator.

DELAYED BURN

Juno slipped into "safe mode", possibly in response to an onboard computer reboot, a little over 13 hours from its closest approach to Jupiter. The mission has been in safe mode several times since its 2011 launch; operations are typically restored within hours to days. Engineers are working through a series of steps to restore communications. If and when they start talking to Juno again, they will turn towards resolving a separate, apparently unrelated propellant issue.
On October 14, NASA announced that Juno would delay burning its engines as it had planned to during the October 19 close fly-by, or perijove. The engine burn would have nudged the craft from its 53.5-day orbit to a 14-day orbit. But two helium valves needed for the procedure did not respond as expected while being pressurized in the lead-up to the burn. Mission managers decided to put it off, hastily scheduled a series of science observations for the upcoming perijove—and then, four days later, saw their spacecraft enter safe mode.
Juno can stay in its 53.5-day orbit indefinitely and still get nearly all of the science it had been planning to gather at Jupiter, Bolton says, including unraveling the mysteries of the planet's origin and whether or not it has a core. The science discoveries come mostly at each close fly-by, so stretching out the time between each perijove means that researchers gather data more slowly.

AN EARLY LOOK

Despite Juno's current issues, there was a spot of good news. Bolton presented early results from Juno's first flyby of Jupiter—on August 27—at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences and the European Planetary Science Congress. The data included one of the best looks yet deep into Jupiter's swirling clouds.
A microwave instrument on Juno has found that Jupiter's wide atmospheric bands extend as much as 400 kilometres deep into the gas giant—though the bands display new twists and turns the deeper they go. "Deep down Jupiter is similar but also very different from what we see on the surface," Bolton says.
Juno's camera has also captured new visual details on the storms, like the famous Great Red Spot, that rage across Jupiter. Unlike other spacecraft that have visited the giant planet, Juno is whizzing up and over the planet's poles, giving researchers the first-ever view of the northern and southern extremes. The spacecraft's first fly-by found that Jupiter's north pole lacks the mysterious hexagon of swirling clouds that dominate Saturn's north pole.
Another new image shows a towering cyclone, its clouds illuminated from the side as the sun rises on Jupiter. At 7,000 kilometres across and 100 kilometres tall, "it is a truly towering beast of a storm," Bolton says.
Other data, not yet made public, includes information on Jupiter's powerful magnetic and gravity fields, as well as its shimmering auroras. "Every dataset has a discovery aspect in it that we're in the middle of trying to understand," says Bolton.
The next fly-by is scheduled for December 11.

[BridgeTroll]

http://www.popsci.com/juno-remains-stuck-in-wrong-orbit

JUNO IS STILL STUCK IN THE WRONG ORBIT AROUND JUPITER
PROBLEMS WITH THE SPACECRAFT'S ENGINES ARE PREVENTING IT FROM ENTERING A NEW ORBIT FOR OBSERVATIONS
By Michael Koziol  Yesterday at 5:49pm

Things are really not going Juno's way.
The spacecraft made a triumphant arrival to Jupiter last July 4 and promptly settled into a stable orbit. But now it's having trouble getting out of that orbit.

On October 14, NASA announced it would postpone that week's planned attempt to move Juno into a closer orbit in order to study the planet. NASA identified the problem as a pair of helium check valves that assist in firing the spacecraft's main engines. Rather than opening in seconds, as they're supposed to, it took several minutes for the valves to open during a test leading up to the planned engine burn.
The new orbit would shorten Juno's trips around Jupiter from almost two months to about two weeks, allowing for closer -- and more frequent -- flybys. This "science orbit" was intended to be the spacecraft's final orbit, the result of its final engine burn. After 20 months spent studying the planet, Juno would have plummeted into Jupiter and burned up in February 2018. The fiery death would avoid the accidental contamination of any potential life on Jupiter's moons with our Earthly bacteria.
It's not clear what the next step for the mission is. Juno's next opportunity to enter its science orbit will be on December 11. But NASA recently confirmed that it would instead be a "science flyby." Rather than settle into a new orbit, Juno will switch on all its instruments and point them at the planet to gather data, much like it did back in August.

After that, the next opportunities to enter a tighter orbit are February 2 and March 27, but NASA won't commit to any of the dates until they have a chance to try and fix the valve problem.
If worst comes to worst, Juno will be stuck in its 53 day orbit for the duration of the mission. The mission scientists don't expect this to be much of a problem, though. "We can do all of our science in a 53-day orbit if needed," principle investigator Scott Bolton said during a recent press conference in Pasadena. It can collect the same data while in its more distant orbit, though the time crunch may mean collecting less of it.

Juno's mission is to study the origin and evolution of Jupiter, our solar system's oldest and largest planet by far, by probing the planet's atmosphere, mapping magnetic fields, and examining its auroras with a plethora of scientific equipment. It's also solar-powered, setting a new deep-space record for a solar-powered spacecraft.
It's so impressive that we named it the most important aerospace invention this year, in anticipation of the scientific understanding it would provide of our largest planetary neighbor. Here's to hoping a pair of pesky valves don't deflate Juno's potential too much.

[BridgeTroll]

I guess we kind of get used to NASA successes... this one seems to have fallen a bit flat... Jupiter is a very tough customer... 

http://www.popsci.com/juno-spacecraft-gives-up-decides-to-take-long-way-around-jupiter

Juno spacecraft gives up, decides to take the long way around Jupiter
It's permanently stuck in the wrong orbit, but at least there's a nice view
By Sarah Fecht  February 17, 2017

The Juno spacecraft has been stuck in the wrong orbit around Jupiter for months, and today NASA announced that they're just going to leave it there. The team has given up on finding a way into a more ideal orbit.
The Juno spacecraft arrived at Jupiter in July 2016, and everything was going great for a little while. It sent back some cool photos, and from its orbit within 2,600 miles of Jupiter—that's about 8 times closer than we've ever been before—it's getting the best views of the gas giant humankind has ever seen.

There's just one problem: It's currently taking Juno 53 days to make a single pass around Jupiter. The spacecraft was supposed to get a little closer and reduce its orbit to 14 days, but its engines crapped out. Some valves aren't operating the way they should, and Juno's scientists are worried that firing the engine could actually put the spacecraft into a worse orbit. So instead, it will live out the remainder of its days (that is, until July 2018) while staying the course.
But NASA, naturally, is trying to make the best of the situation, saying that the longer orbit allows for "bonus science" that wasn't in the original plan, providing new information about Jupiter's extraordinary magnetosphere. Juno will also spend less time in the worst parts of Jupiter's radiation belts, which may extend the spacecraft's lifetime.
With any luck, it'll mean we get to see more fantastic images like this one, below. So maybe taking the scenic route won't be so bad.

View of Jupiter's south pole, taken on February 2, 2017, from an altitude of about 62,800 miles.