Updates Juno Mission News and Updates

[orb]

The Planetary Society Blogs - Emily Lakdawalla: Juno's first taste of science from Jupiter

 

[Notebook]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36695270

When the US space agency's latest probe to Jupiter tries to enter into orbit around the planet on Tuesday, it will be relying on a British rocket engine.

The Juno satellite is rapidly bearing down on the gas giant after a five-year journey from Earth.

It must slow itself to get captured by the gravity of the giant world.

This all-or-nothing job will be performed by its Leros-1b engine built by Moog-ISP in Westcott, Buckinghamshire.

 

[Notebook]

New unit of pressure, the Elephant/Stiletto...

"The atmospheric pressure at Earth is about one bar; at the centre of Jupiter it is 80 million bar," explained mission team-member Fran Bagenal from the University of Colorado. "That's like a thousand elephants, one on top of the other, with the bottom elephant standing on a stiletto."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36700048

N.

 

[Urwumpe]

New unit of pressure, the Elephant/Stiletto...



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36700048

N.

You mean a new unit of area. The Elephant unit of force is already standardized. The question is, which Stiletto do they mean: The Italian dagger? Or the shoe? And which surface area of the Stiletto is the reference?

 

[Notebook]

Could even be The Evil Greenback's henchman...
http://danmacgregor.wikia.com/wiki/Stiletto_Mafiosa

 

[C3PO]

Could even be The Evil Greenback's henchman...
http://danmacgregor.wikia.com/wiki/Stiletto_Mafiosa

"Evil henchcrow" must be one of the best titles ever! :rofl:

 

[Unstung]

A couple briefings prior to orbit insertion, with the more recent one first:

 

[C3PO]

I bet the crew is 'exited'

Quite literally. :lol:

 

[N_Molson]

NASA TV Events schedule (All times are Eastern) :

This Fourth of July, NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter after an almost five-year journey. News briefings, photo opportunities and other media events will be held at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

In the evening of July 4, Juno will perform a suspenseful orbit insertion maneuver, a 35-minute burn of its main engine, to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second) so it can be captured into the gas giant’s orbit. Once in Jupiter’s orbit, the spacecraft will circle the Jovian world 37 times during 20 months, skimming to within 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) above the cloud tops. This is the first time a spacecraft will orbit the poles of Jupiter, providing new answers to ongoing mysteries about the planet’s core, composition and magnetic fields.

NASA TV Events Schedule

For all media briefings, reporters may ask questions by phone by contacting Gina Fontes at 818-354-9380 or [email protected]. All times are Eastern.

Thursday, June 16
2 p.m. -- Mission status briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington

Thursday, June 30
1 p.m. -- Mission overview news briefing at JPL
2 p.m. -- Mission outreach briefing at JPL

Monday, July 4 – Orbit Insertion Day
Noon -- Pre-orbit insertion briefing at JPL
10:30 p.m. -- Orbit insertion and NASA TV commentary begin

Tuesday, July 5
1 a.m. -- Post-orbit insertion briefing at JPL

To watch all of these events online, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

http://www.ustream.tv/nasa

http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2

 

[ADSWNJ]

Juno spacecraft has just begun the orientation maneuver into Jovian retrograde position (approx a 90 degree yaw, to be executed in a 900 sec period). The rotation is still around 2 rpm. Details here.

Orientation complete. T-34m to the retro burn. Spinning up to 5 rpm. Interestingly, not quite full retrograde. She looks tail down maybe 20 degrees.

Burn firing now... amazing how Jupiter accelerated the spacecraft over 45 mins from maybe 40 km/s to the current 54 km/s. That's more than the speed to go from stationary on Earth to escaping Earth's influence.

Burn complete, and spinning back down to 2 rpm. Waiting for confirmation of good burn (48 light mins away)

@11.19pm EDT (03:19 UTC) - tones detected for satellite burn start back on Earth. Looks like we have a new Jovian satellite. (Signing out now ... work tomorrow!)

 

[Unstung]

I think the burn you see in the animations is off, it may be based on Juno's original Jupiter orbit plan.

I updated my timer in an earlier post to when the orbit insertion burn starts. It's 20 minutes from now, 8:18 PM PDT.

 

[GLS]

I think the burn you see in the animations is off, it may be based on Juno's original Jupiter orbit plan.

The animation has 2 "modes": the real-time events as one would see by being on Jupiter, and the time at which the signals sent from the spacecraft are received on Earth.
Actually, the burn is now complete*, but the signals sent from the spacecraft during the full burn are still somewhere between Jupiter and us.

Edit:
*) if all worked well of course...

 

[mahdavi3d]

Engine shutdown! Mission control confirms Juno's main engine has turned off right on time.

 

[GLS]

Engine shutdown! Mission control confirms Juno's main engine has turned off right on time.

Actually they reported a 1 second difference between the predicted and actual burn times...

 

[Urwumpe]

Actually they reported a 1 second difference between the predicted and actual burn times...

That's right on time for such a long burn.... I remember that the rule for old Soyuz spacecraft was to count to three before manually terminating a deorbit burn.

 

[karthikaqpt]

The search Engine Google is showing an animated Doodle to celebrate this achievement.
Over the next few months,

’s mission and science teams will perform final testing on the spacecraft’s subsystems, final calibration of science instruments and some science collection.

 

[Unstung]

The Jupiter orbit insertion stream and the press briefing immediately following it:

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Google gets it right sometimes.

 

[N_Molson]

Nice one, I'm sure that probe is going to gather terabits of valuable data over the years ! We still know so little about gas giants.

 

[ADSWNJ]

Juno downlinking 120kbit/sec right now, at -128dBm (per DSN Now). That's around 180 atto-Watts of power. Just stunning how humankind can not only detect that low a power, but stream kilobits of data over it ....


1 / 100-billionth of the power of a received WiFi signal. smh in amazement.