Juno Arrives at Jupiter Today

Tuckerfan · Dec 14, 2016

Pics from Juno.

More at the link.

Tuckerfan · Feb 9, 2017

Pics of the South Pole.

Tuckerfan · Feb 19, 2017

Juno's mission has changed, slightly.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft will stay in its long orbit for the remainder of its mission

On Friday, NASA announced that it Juno spacecraft would remain in its current 53-day orbit of Jupiter for the duration of its mission. The decision is a new setback for the spacecraft, which was scheduled to shift to a shorter, 14 day orbital schedule.

This isn’s the first time that Juno has run into issues orbiting Jupiter. In October, NASA delayed an orbit around the planet due to a pair of helium check valves not working properly. While the spacecraft has since completed two additional orbits — the latest was on February 2nd — the mission’s planners were concerned that “another main engine burn could result in a less-than-desirable orbit,” explained Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Juno’s 53-day orbit is highly elliptical, taking the spacecraft within 2,600 miles of the atmosphere to five million miles away, which helps the spacecraft minimize its exposure to the planet’s radiation belts. In a shorter orbit, the spacecraft would have completed 33 orbits. The decision to keep Juno in its present orbit will help reduce the chances of something going wrong, but it also means that Juno will be able to conduct fewer orbits. The next flyby is scheduled to take place on March 27th.

Despite the change, NASA noted that it will be able to do some additional work that wasn’t originally planned, such as exploring the planet’s magnetosphere. The decision to keep Juno in its current orbit will also limit its exposure to Jupiter’s radiation. “This is significant,” Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio explained, “because radiation has been the main life-limiting factor for Juno.”

Currently, Juno is scheduled to fly through July 2018 for 12 additional orbits, and mission planners will evaluate extending its life. Once the mission is over, the spacecraft will be de-orbited and will burn up in Jupiter’s atmosphere to avoid any potential contamination of the Jovian moons.
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Nono · Feb 19, 2017

Meanwhile, you can slowly say goodbye to incredible Cassini here.

Tuckerfan · Mar 27, 2017

More pics. I look at this one, and I can just hear the Mutara Nebula theme from TWoK.

Bickendan · Mar 31, 2017

Tuckerfan said: ↑

More pics. I look at this one, and I can just hear the Mutara Nebula theme from TWoK.

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Tuckerfan · May 25, 2017

And we're starting to get scientific papers.

NASA's Juno Mission Just Dropped Its First Huge Pile of Results

There’s no drama quite like space drama. And Juno’s flight to Jupiter has been about as dramatic as a sci-fi thriller can get. Last October, Juno’s engine system malfunctioned, causing NASA to delay the orbiter’s planned approach into a 14-day “science orbit.” This February, NASA decided to forego the science orbit engine burn entirely, keeping the spacecraft in its much longer 53.5 day orbit. But today, we’re finally getting some good news.

NASA is releasing Juno’s first scientific results, in a dump of nearly 50 papers published in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters today. The mission’s plan to study the crap out of the planet has managed to offer surprises wherever possible. Be it the gas giant’s gravitational field, aurorae, or just the weather, Jupiter is a whole lot weirder than anyone thought it would be.

“It’s a lot more complex than scientists have been assuming. That’s a theme that runs through almost all the datasets that we have,” Scott Bolton, Juno’s principle investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Texas told Gizmodo. “One of the most exciting results is this paradigm shift—we have to rethink how giant planets work in general.”

Juno has a suite of instruments for measuring microwaves, infrared waves, radio waves, visible light, Jupiter’s magnetic field, and other particles. The craft’s enlongated orbit around the planet allows periodic up-close measurements, taken during “perijove” passes. The data helps scientists understand some of Jupiter’s most important properties, including the shape of its gigantic magnetic field, how gasses are distributed inside the planet and how they move around, how much water the planet has in its atmosphere, and hopefully, the giant gassy planet’s structure all the way down to its core.

The most recent analyses come from only one or two of Juno’s closest approaches, so it’s just a snippet of the total data to be collected from the mission (initially, Juno was slated to make 33 perijove passes, but following the decision to keep the spacecraft in a wider orbit, that number has been reduced). But initial observations show a gravitational field differing from scientist’s original expectations, poles with lots of clustered storms more chaotic than Saturn’s, a magnetic field twice as strong as expected, and crazy process for generating auroras, probably far different from Earth’s.

It’s important to point out that one or two passes isn’t nearly enough to make many striking conclusions aside from “Jupiter is weird.” “It’s like you want to understand the middle of the Earth, assumed it wasn’t mostly symmetric, and all you did was fly over Florida and New York,” said Bolton. “You wouldn’t be able to know what it was like over California or Africa or Europe.”

Aside from limitations of the spacecraft’s orbit and changes to the mission itself, most of the folks I spoke with thought Juno’s instruments—the best that have ever been flown to Jupiter to study it—outweighed its limitations. “We’re getting better data than we ever had before,” Kimberly Moore, Harvard graduate student, told Gizmodo. “The question isn’t what our limits are, but how much better our results are.”

And if there’s someone who knows about Juno’s technological improvements, it’s Bill Kurth from the University of Iowa. He studied radio waves with the Voyager mission almost forty years ago, and is now working on radio wave and plasma observations for Juno. The new instruments have allowed Kurth and other radio scientists to do something Voyager scientists couldn’t—fly right through some of the solar system’s most intense radio emissions, emanating from Jupiter. “I think the Voyager program enabled us to write down the questions that we could answer with these followup missions,” said Kurth.

Mark Hofstadter, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, was only part of the proposal process and as a sort-of outside source felt these first results have been a “beautiful example of how science often works.” Theorists create all sorts of models to try to explain data, and scientists tend to favor the simplest ones. But those models often aren’t quite right. Now that observers have actually collected data, theorists need to go back and try to figure out what the heck is going on.

Hofstadter was especially excited about weather patterns that seem to go deep down, several hundred kilometers below Jupiter’s surface. Sure, we see the raging storms on the surface, but there seems to be even more complexity beneath.

Researchers didn’t seem to be too disappointed about the longer-than-expected orbits, either, since they give folks more time to do science, Randy Gladstone, another SwRI physicist, told Gizmodo. He did point out that the spacecraft’s new alignment will be tricky to deal with—it was supposed to orbit around the planet’s twilight region between dawn and dusk, but now experiences full sun and full dark time. That’s not the conditions the instruments were built to operate in. It will also be more difficult to deal with the increased exposure to sunlight while trying to look at the planet’s aurora.

Ultimately, researchers hope to understand not just the largest planet in the solar system, but how planets form in general. Things like the abundance of each element on Jupiter can help scientists constrain their theories about other gas giants, said Bolton. “But you won’t be able to test those predictions until you fly a mission to those plaents as well.”

If you’re excited about Juno, you can help vote on where the visible light JunoCam should point during perijove. After new images are taken, they’re dropped online where folks with the right software can process them and make some pretty incredible pictures. And if you were wondering what the planet smelled like, “it would have a stronger ammonia smell than Uranus or Neptune,” said Hofstadter. So, a lot more like pee than farts.
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Tuckerfan · Jul 13, 2017

Close up pics of the Great Red Spot have arrived.

Tuckerfan · Jan 6, 2020

Tuckerfan · Oct 29, 2021

The Great Red Spot is over 100 miles high.

NASA's Juno Spacecraft Reveals the Depth of Jupiter's Great Red Spot

NASA's Juno spacecraft, which launched in 2011, recently made two passes over Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the circular storm that rages in perpetuity on the gas giant's surface. The probe revealed that the storm extends for hundreds of miles beneath the planet's gaseous surface, a press statement from NASA reveals.

Scientists have long known that the Great Red Spot has a diameter of 10,000 miles (16,093 km), meaning that the Earth itself could fit inside the storm. But, until recently, they could only really speculate at the depth of the red circle.

Uncovering the mysteries of a monstrous storm
In 2019, NASA decided to change their Juno spacecraft's trajectory. The Jupiter probe has been on a wide orbit around the planet since 2016, and it had mainly been trained on assessing the composition of the gas giant and analyzing its north and south poles, which had never been seen before. However, in 2019 the space agency redirected Juno to pass over the Great Red Spot twice, to collect data on the gargantuan storm.

Thanks to those two passes, NASA scientists now know the depth of the Great Red Spot, within a fairly accurate range. In a paper published in Science, researchers on the project revealed that the storm has a depth of between 186 and 310 miles (300 to 500 km). In an interview with The Verge, Yohai Kaspi, co-investigator on the project, said "that means it’s a gigantic storm. If you would put this storm on Earth, it would extend all the way to the [International Space Station]. So it’s just a monster."

We now have a 3D view of Jupiter like never before
To find the depth, the NASA team used sensors on Juno to measure the spot's gravitational field. This showed that the storm extended as far as 310 miles. The data collected was then combined with previous microwave measurements taken by the probe in 2017, showing that the storm must reach a depth of at least 186 miles.

Surprisingly, though the Great Red Spot has an impressive depth, it doesn't reach as far under Jupiter's surface as jet streams also analyzed by Juno that go 2,000 miles (roughly 3,200 km) under the planet's surface.

Further measurements in the future will help the scientific community to gain an even better understanding of the structures of Jupiter. For now, our understanding of the gas giant has gained a massive boost thanks to the three-dimensional view provided by the sensors aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft.

As Scott Bolton, the principal Juno investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio puts it, "we're starting to put all these individual pieces together and getting our first real understanding of how Jupiter's beautiful and violent atmosphere works – in 3D."
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You know, we really need to send blimps to Jupiter and all the other planets with atmospheres. The amount of data we could gather by doing so would just be astounding.

Tuckerfan · Jul 29, 2023

NASA's Juno probe to capture Jupiter's volcanic moon Io

It’ll come within 13K miles of the moon.

Tuckerfan · Sep 15, 2023

Jupiter's Volcanic Moon Io Looks Ominous in New Juno Image

Tuckerfan · Dec 29, 2023

Juno Spacecraft Gears Up for Closest Look at Jupiter's Tormented Moon

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