Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA’s Juno spacecraft will celebrate July 4 with a series of super-close Jupiter flybys

By
Jupiter: Into the Unknown (NASA Juno Mission Trailer)
On Independence Day, while you’re grilling burgers and guzzling beer, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will boost its main engine for half an hour and dip into Jovian orbit, breaking records and taking data during 37 consecutive close approaches.

Jupiter is shrouded in dense clouds. By flying just 2,900 miles above the cloud layer, Juno will pass closer to the gas giant than any prior spacecraft, smashing NASA’s Pioneer 11 record by 18,000 miles. From this distance, Juno will be able to examine Jupiter’s auroras and offer scientists insight into the planet’s origin, structure, atmosphere, and magnetosphere.

Recommended Videos

But nearness comes at a cost. “We are not looking for trouble, we are looking for data,” Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a NASA press release. “Problem is, at Jupiter, looking for the kind of data Juno is looking for, you have to go in the kind of neighborhoods where you could find trouble pretty quick.”

Jupiter’s caustic, clay-colored clouds aren’t necessarily the source of worry. Beneath the top cloud layer, highly pressurized, metallic hydrogen creates a kind of electrical conductor, which — along with Jupiter’s rotation — scientists think creates a magnetic field with tons of high-energy particles and some of the most intense radiation in the whole solar system.

“Over the life of the mission, Juno will be exposed to the equivalent of over 100 million dental X-rays,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “But, we are ready. We designed an orbit around Jupiter that minimizes exposure to Jupiter’s harsh radiation environment. This orbit allows us to survive long enough to obtain the tantalizing science data that we have traveled so far to get.”

To defend against this radiation, NASA equipped Juno with a customized, 400-pound titanium skull within which the ship’s electronic wiring is more or less protected. While the more exposed wiring would hardly last one flyby, the skull gives Juno’s wiring a lifespan of some 20 months. Still, the most dangerous time for Juno will be the beginning, when its initial entrance into Jupiter’s orbit will either make or break the mission.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness
Contributor
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
NASA’s Juno spacecraft to pass within 1,000 miles of volcanic moon Io
This image revealing the north polar region of the Jovian moon Io was taken on October 15 by NASA’s Juno. Three of the mountain peaks visible in the upper part of image, near the day-night dividing line, were observed here for the first time by the spacecraft’s JunoCam.

NASA's Juno spacecraft, currently in orbit around Jupiter, will soon be making a close flyby of one of the planet's most dramatic moons, Io. On Saturday, December 30, Juno will come within 1,000 miles of Io, making it the closest spacecraft to that moon in the last 20 years.

Io is an intriguing place because it shows signs of significant volcanic activity, making it the most geologically active body in the solar system. It hosts over 400 active volcanoes, which periodically erupt due to hot magma inside the moon created by friction caused by the gravitational pull between Jupiter and its other large moons.

Read more
NASA’s Orion spacecraft did something special exactly a year ago
The moon and Earth as seen from the Orion spacecraft in November 2022.

On November 16 last year, NASA achieved the first-ever launch of its next-generation lunar rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), in the Artemis I mission.

The rocket carried to space the new Orion capsule, which journeyed all the way to the moon -- and then beyond -- in a crewless flight to test its systems.

Read more
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft snaps not one, but two asteroids during flyby
This image shows the “moonrise” of the satellite as it emerges from behind asteroid Dinkinesh as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI), one of the most detailed images returned by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby of the asteroid binary. This image was taken at 12:55 p.m. EDT (1655 UTC) Nov. 1, 2023, within a minute of closest approach, from a range of approximately 270 miles (430 km). From this perspective, the satellite is behind the primary asteroid. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast.

NASA's Lucy spacecraft is on its way to the orbit of Jupiter to study the asteroids there, called Trojans. Recently, while on its trip, it made a quick flyby of another small asteroid called Dinkinesh. The spacecraft confirmed its flyby of the asteroid this week, but when it returned the images it took, there was a surprise in store: a second, even smaller asteroid tucked up next to Dinkinesh.

Lucy took images using its Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) camera, which confirmed that the larger asteroid is around 0.5 miles across and the smaller asteroid is just 0.15 miles across. As the spacecraft approached Dinkinesh, the Lucy team had wondered if it might be part of a pair, called a binary system, because of the way its brightness changed over time. When the spacecraft flew by and snapped its images, this speculation was confirmed.

Read more