Not in the plan. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-j...rbit-at-jupiter -- "NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, which has been in orbit around the gas giant since July 4, 2016, will remain in its current 53-day orbit for the remainder of the mission." (italics mine.)

Reducing the period simply shortens mission duration, it doesn't really change what science can be done.

The instrument suite is simply not capable of doing any substantive science of the moons, and the orbit is just fine as is for doing everything it can do. And I don't think the amount of remaining delta-v (about 350 m/s) is all that enabling of major orbit changes other than period reduction anyway. But feel free to peruse "Minimum impulse transfers to rotate the line of apsides" and report back -- https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/handle/2014/37665 -- IIRC the rule of thumb is that the delta V of a apsides rotation is 1/4 of the velocity difference at the point where the old and new orbits cross.

Lightly-processed quicklook version of image pj5-110. I'm sure others will do a better job.

Expected by who?

Obviously the metadata was computed with a predicted spacecraft position and that may change a little once we have the reconstruction, but I'm fairy confident that the calculation is right. Keep in mind that because of Jupiter's oblateness, the geometry to figure out the altitude is a little more complex than simply taking the distance to the center of Jupiter and subtracting the radius of Jupiter, which is what a simple calculation might do.

Here's the code that computes the metadata if you're interested (in Python, using NAIF/pyspice):

But is there extra funding? It's worth nothing that publishing open-access usually involves the authors paying extra charges. For example, Space Science Reviews has no page charges for conventional publishing but charges an additional $3000 per article for open access.

FWIW, not by anybody I ever heard talking about it. I think Europa Clipper was a semi-official name used for the latest concept of a lower-cost multiple-flyby mission that took over when the Europa orbiter was decided to be too expensive. One could do some history on OPAG minutes and such like if one really cared.

At any rate, it's now officially Europa Clipper and I guess we'll see if it ever happens.

To be clear, Clipper recently passed its Key Decision Point-B review but it doesn't move forward into implementation until KDP-C. I don't personally consider a mission to be "on" until after KDP-C.

The lander never was funded for real so it couldn't be "cancelled" -- there are still technology development programs that are funded and have some applicability for the lander; e.g., https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewre...bstracts%20.pdf

61.69 is simply the crosstrack FOV if the camera were a perfect pinhole camera with the given pixel pitch and focal length; i.e., degrees(1600*7.4e-3/10.997) = 61.69.

Of course, the camera is not a perfect pinhole camera so you shouldn't expect the 61.69 to be particularly meaningful; it's in a comment after all.

The I kernel (and the frames kernel for Junocam) are admittedly works in progress. I hope to have another update in a few months.

BTW, I saw someone on twitter saying that the final snap open of the cover in the video is real (true) and that it's caused by a magnet (false.) There is a magnet on the cover but it's only used for position sensing -- there is nothing ferromagnetic on the outside structure of MAHLI. The snap is caused by a feature of the mechanism that keeps the cover from moving under vibration at the ends of travel.

For some reason I now know a lot more about the details of the MAHLI mechanism than I did a couple of weeks ago.

I think you should restrain your jaw until you read an actual published paper. Not saying it's happening in this case, but media reports are not a good source of real scientific results for a variety of reasons.

To be clear, I have zero inside knowledge of this because I haven't been paying attention.

Not to be annoying about it, but this ISS resupply mission is off-topic for this forum and hardly a "private mission" since it's being paid for by NASA. I think there are more appropriate sites to follow SpaceX's progress.

ADMIN: Agreed re this mission, and all others in support of crewed spaceflight. Discussion of Falcon launch and recovery operations are fine; let's please stick to that rather rigorously in the future. Thread title will be updated for clarity.

Well, there are two steps: the first is to figure out if there are any eclipses near a perijove pass, and the second is to determine if the shadow would be visible from Juno. For step 1 you don't need to know where Juno is exactly.

Keep in mind that later in the mission Jupiter isn't even in the Junocam FOV for a lot of the time as the orbit plane migrates away from the terminator, so that's another constraint.

The most accurate source of PJ times I know of are in the .orb files on the NAIF website. The most recent one is https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/JUNO/ker...0912_161027.orb but only goes through orbit 22.

The orbit period is not precisely a constant because there are trim maneuvers, especially later in the mission to avoid eclipses. If you only want to know it to a few hours' accuracy, adding a constant may be good enough.

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=233216 shows a list (dates only) through PJ9. I have a later list, of course, but am not authorized to share it.

That sort of argument just feeds into the notion that Junocam is somehow inferior. It's not inferior, it's just different. The driving requirement was to be able to image the full disc of Jupiter from above the pole, which led to a very wide field of view, utterly unlike the instruments that it's being compared to.

My suspicion is that people just look at the basically-raw images on missionjuno and compare them to the best, most heavily-processed press releases from Voyager or Galileo. And they also likely can't tell what the scale of any particular image is -- all Junocam images are limb-to-limb, even the highest-resolution ones, and the maximum resolution is only achieved at the center of the image. If I had the time I would process some high-res Voyager images and compare them to the Junocam images -- in most places Jupiter is pretty bland at the km scale.

IR cut filters are trivial. The wavelengths silicon sensors are sensitive to are in the very near IR near 1 micron, not in the thermal IR. Imaging in the near IR can be a good thing on Venus because there is less scattering from the atmosphere, at least in some bandpasses. Bottom line: no new technology required if there is some way to cool the sensor.

And we are a long way from having electronics that work at Venus ambient, let alone image sensors, this most recent development notwithstanding.

This is sol 1606 so this news is a bit old...

This is a hot pixel most likely caused by neutrons from the RTG. We've been hoping it would anneal out (like a similar pixel on the other Mastcam did) but so far no luck.

Thanks, Roman. It's images like this one that keep me going in the face of all the negative clueless remarks on reddit about the supposed "mediocrity" of Junocam.

Maybe buried black monoliths.

Seems I was unduly pessimistic about this, the images went live on missionjuno a few minutes ago.

Note that the image called "Oval BA" is not really of Oval BA. Our targeting process needs some work, as based on my predictions, there was no way we were going to see Oval BA on this pass near the nadir. You can see it in the subsequent image, but it's off on the limb.

Note that this pass was in the MWR attitude so the HGA is off earth-point and we can't send science data (engineering only at 250 bps). You can watch https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html to see if Juno is being tracked and at what data rate. We only went to high rate about 1/2 hour ago, I think, which is one of the reasons why I said we wouldn't have anything soon.

I don't know anything about what the other teams are doing, and if I did, I couldn't say anyway.

Unofficial status: Be advised that even though PJ4 is at about 5 AM PST tomorrow morning, DSN coverage is spotty, so we may not have the data down until late Friday, if then. I wouldn't expect to see it at missionjuno before Monday at the earliest.

It doesn't work that way. When the camera is off, it's off. It takes a fair amount of power to run the cameras (a few watts), so it's not like they are run more than needed.