Juno development, launch, and cruise, Including Earth flyby imaging Oct 9 2013 Options

[PhilHorzempa]

I thought that it was time to start a new thread devoted to the JUNO Jupiter
Orbiter mission. This New Frontiers Mission #2 seems to be a "stealth" project
with little information available on the Web. In fact, the official NASA JUNO
web site is quite pitiful. It contains the minimal amount of information on what
seems to be an intriguing mission, in terms of both science and engineering.

Does the UMSF community have information on this mission that has not
been widely seen before?

Another Phil

[Roly]

Any further news about JunoCam pictures of the satellites? I know this is absolutely outside the mission, but there was some speculation I believe (assuming it ends up being fitted to the spacecraft) that there may be some possibility. I seem to remember that there might be a chance at Io.

[mcaplinger]

Any further news about JunoCam pictures of the satellites?

JunoCam is a wide-field-of-view instrument, so a satellite approach would have to be pretty close to yield anything better than what we have already. And I suspect that Juno will be deliberately kept away from the satellites to keep the orbit perturbations to a minimum. But it's a long time until this mission flies, so I wouldn't count anything out yet.

And on the topic of gravity measurements, I ran across an abstract, "Gravity Inversion Considerations for Radio Doppler Data from the JUNO Jupiter Polar Orbiter" ( http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v36n4/dps2004/158.htm ) that describes some possibilities, though I haven't seen the full paper.

[JRehling]

JunoCam is a wide-field-of-view instrument, so a satellite approach would have to be pretty close to yield anything better than what we have already. And I suspect that Juno will be deliberately kept away from the satellites to keep the orbit perturbations to a minimum.

Since Io has a time-varying phenomenon or two, occasional medium-range pictures could be informative. Earth-based observations have been proven capable of spotting the big ones, but some more frames of what we could consider to be a "movie" with many gaps (mainly gaps) on the ongoing record of post-1979 flareups on Io couldn't hurt.

The Anderson, et al, abstract on gravity science is interesting. They do mention observing the tides raised by the Galileans and Amalthea (which is much, much closer to the cloudtops, thus having a serious tidal effect despite its small size and low density). I might as well start learning the math behind the rest of the content of that abstract now.