NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft executed the first of two scheduled maneuvers to adjust its flight plan earlier this week, bringing it one step closer to its rendezvous with Jupiter in a little under five months, officials from the US space agency announced on Wednesday.
Juno, which originally launched on August 5, 2011, fired its thrusters at 1:38pm EST (10:38am PST) on the morning of February 3, altering its speed by one foot (0.31 meters) per second and consuming 1.3 pounds (0.6 kilograms of fuel) during the process, according to NASA.
At the time of the maneuver, the spacecraft was approximately 51 million miles (82 million km) from the largest planetary inhabitant in the solar system and about 425 million miles (684 million km) from Earth. Its next trajectory correction is scheduled to take place sometime in May.
In a statement, Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said that the maneuvers would “fine tune Juno’s orbit around the sun” while also “perfecting our rendezvous with Jupiter on July 4th at 8:18 p.m. PDT [11:18 p.m. EDT].”
Record-setting solar powered craft to orbit Jupiter 33 times
Once it arrives at the Jovian system, Juno will orbit Jupiter 33 times, closing to within 3,100 miles (5,000 km) of the planet’s cloud tops once every two weeks. During these flybys, the probe will peer beneath the cloud cover and study the planet’s aurora, providing scientists with new insight into the origins, structure, atmosphere, and magnetosphere of the world below.
Last month, Juno established a new distance record for solar-powered spacecraft, shattering the previous mark held by the ESA’s Rosetta orbiter by reaching the 493 million mile mark. By the time it reaches Jupiter, it will have become just the eight spacecraft to have travelled more than 500 million miles from Earth, and the first to run on something other than nuclear power.
This graphic shows how NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter became the most distant solar-powered explorer and influenced the future of space exploration powered by the sun. (Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
As it continues towards Jupiter, Juno, which has a 30-foot-long solar array and more than 18,000 solar cells, will be collecting just 1/25th as much energy from the sun as it did early on during its voyage. Fortunately for NASA, its massive arrays are extremely efficient at converting light into energy and will be able to provide the probe with enough power to keep it fully operational.
“Juno is all about pushing the edge of technology to help us learn about our origins,” Bolton said last month in a statement. “We use every known technique to see through Jupiter’s clouds and reveal the secrets Jupiter holds of our solar system’s early history. It just seems right that the sun is helping us learn about the origin of Jupiter and the other planets that orbit it.”
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Feature Image: Launching from Earth in 2011, the Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter in 2016 to study the giant planet from an elliptical, polar orbit. (Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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