Juno’s unprecedented views of Jupiter and its moons are a present that retains on giving.
The NASA spacecraft was initially slated to finish its mission in 2018 after finishing 34 orbits of the large planet. It’s now on orbit 47. How lengthy scientists will get this front-row view of those worlds isn’t clear, significantly because the spacecraft zooms ever nearer to the fuel large and the highly effective, damaging radiation of its magnetosphere.
But Juno is hard, mentioned house physicist Scott Bolton, principal investigator for the Juno mission, at a December 14 information convention in Chicago on the American Geophysical Union’s fall assembly. The spacecraft “is built like an armored tank, and its shields are holding,” mentioned Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute, which has headquarters in San Antonio.
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After coming into a large orbit round Jupiter in 2016, Juno’s pictures rapidly started to assist scientists peer into the planet’s mysteries, together with a geometrical array of cyclones round its poles and the unusual, convoluted form of its magnetic discipline (SN: 3/7/18; SN: 9/5/18). Juno spied lightning storms zipping throughout the tops of the planet’s clouds, and revealed that Jupiter is the one planet apart from Earth identified to host ephemeral, lightning-generated atmospheric glows generally known as sprites and elves (SN: 8/5/20; SN: 11/2/20).
Juno has additionally handed by a few of the planet’s moons, flying by Ganymede in 2021. Ganymede “is bathed by Jupiter’s magnetic field,” and Juno was capable of observe, amongst different issues, a tug of struggle of magnetic discipline traces between the planet and its moon, mentioned house physicist Thomas Greathouse, additionally of the Southwest Research Institute.
In September, Juno flew by Jupiter’s moon Europa, capturing in new element the chaotic crisscrosses of cracks, ridges and bands within the moon’s icy floor. Now the spacecraft is on its manner towards Io, the innermost moon.
While Juno appears to be going robust, “the end could come in two different ways,” Bolton mentioned. Juno may grow to be too degraded by the extraordinary radiation to perform — or it may merely run out of propellant, which is required to maintain its antennas pointed towards Earth. If that occurs, “it could be collecting data, but can’t send it back.”
