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

[edstrick]

Bruce Moomaw has a couple articles worth checking out:

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Juno_Get...livery_999.html

Basically, the italians proposed a second meteorology cam for Juno, together with an infrared cam/spectrometer, and a Ka-band transponder to improve radio tracking.

The meteorology cam was rejected as too similar to JunoCam, but the IR instrument's provisionally accepted, as is the transponder. If the IR instrument does fly, it patches what to me has seemed a major hole in the mission's instrumentation: The ability to see and measure with good resolution cloud structures and the "hot spots" of downwelling (like the one the Galileo probe fell into) that are water and ammonia depleted relative to the deep atmospheric average. This gives the linkage between visible cloud patterns/meteorology, deeper cloud structure, and the to-be-microwave-mapped sub-cloud atmosphere distribution of water and ammonia.

GO FOR IT!

also, on lunar robotic exploration and budget/political/patronage chicanery:
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/NASA_B...ferred_999.html