In a risky maneuver, the Juno probe attempt orbit Jupiter in a few hours
The Juno probe US space agency NASA is approaching quickly to, bigger and monstrous oldest planet in our solar system: Jupiter
Every hour that passes will be crucial to the success of the mission, but its peak will be the 35 minutes will begin at 3:18 GMT Tuesday (this Monday afternoon or evening in Latin America, depending on where you are).
in that time, the spacecraft must execute a perfect braking maneuver to bring into orbit, which will surely put on edge all who are in the control center’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL , for its acronym in English) in California.
If successful, Juno will spend the next 18 months analyzing what happens under the thick clouds of the planet. But if the engines do not work at the right time, or do during an insufficient period, then this adventure of $ 1.100 million will be lost in deep space .
And to inject even more suspense to the matter, during the duration of braking maneuvers Juno not have its main antenna pointing to Earth.
that means the mission team should follow the event through tones that will send smaller probe antennas.
Secrets to discover
If we assume that everything happens as it planned then Juno can take a look at the elements that make up this vast mass of gas.
Finally can discover if you have a solid core or if the gas simply compressed into a state even more dense in the center.
We also can get more information on the Great Red Spot : the huge storm that takes flogging Jupiter for hundreds of years. Juno will tell us how deep are the roots of this maelstrom.
The project’s principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in Texas, does not hide his excitement. “Everything about Jupiter is extreme, is a planet on steroids” , told the BBC
“It’s ‘most’ at all.; has the strongest solar system radiation, the strongest magnetic field, the faster rotation … we have to deal with this environment and this ship is literally an armored tank. “
Facts Jupiter
- Jupiter is 11 times wider than Earth and 300 times more massive
- One year on Jupiter are 12 years away from Earth , but one day of that planet is 10 hours in our
- Under pressure , hydrogen turns into a conductive fluid power
- This metallic hydrogen can be the source of the magnetic field
- most of the clouds at the top have ammonia and hydrogen sulfide
- stripes Jupiter they are created by strong winds ranging from east to west
- the Great Red Spot is a whirlwind of a giant storm that is twice the width of the Earth
All this means that once Juno is in orbit, the concerns will not go away. With such a hostile environment, scientists are giving a leap into the unknown.
The engineer of JPL Heidi Becker said the success of Juno completely depend on the protection you receive from your “armor”.
“(Without it) Juno experience radiation more 20 million rads, it is as if a human is take a 100 million dental X-rays in just over a year “he said. But it’s only orbiting 5,000 kilometers above the cloud layers that Juno can obtain the data sought by astronomers.
The insertion into orbit on Monday will put Juno in a large elliptical that will take 53 days to complete. In mid-October will be a second “braking” to reduce the orbit to 14 days. It is here when you really begin to discover the secrets of the giant
-. Jonathan Amos
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