Juno at Jupiter, mission events as they unfold Options

[elakdawalla]

As for the image data, I got a pretty clear answer from Candy Hansen at the press briefing that the way raw image release will work once science data collection begins is that it will happen roughly two days after the return of images, which is the time it takes for navigational data to become available.

[JRehling]

I think, for the most part, Juno will not lend itself well to frequent science updates in the way that missions to Saturn, Mars, etc. have.

The deep-looking spectrometers are going to make observations at every (nominal) perijove, and that data – even from the first perijove alone – may do a pretty good job of answering a lot of the science questions. But the big catch is, the team expected to need to calibrate the analysis as the data came in. They're doing something tricky here, trying to determine the composition of Jupiter's deeper atmosphere by looking right through tens of kilometers of Jupiter's upper atmosphere. The team has already stated that they need to learn how to do this as the mission goes on, so the data we already have (?) may answer the questions, but it's going to be a work in progress to interpret that data. (Kepler was very much this way. The data was on the ground long before the analyses really got going. This was an ongoing process during and after the main mission.)

The radio science exploration of Jupiter's gravitational field will probably play out the same way for different reasons. There's no mystery as to what a single perijove's data will tell us, but the fidelity of the measurements will be refined with multiple observations, and 34 is a lot better than 1. I'm sure we'll have the opportunity for decent advances in understanding after, say, 8 or so perijoves, but it might be mere busywork and/or underwhelming PR for the team to keep releasing vague sets of partial results every month. This is a bit like the orbital alpha/neutron spectrometers on orbiters around the Moon, Mars, and Mercury. Some of the data came with each orbit, but they didn't release it in dribs and drabs, but waited until they had a respectable amount of the final data.

The magnetometer may be an exception to this. There may be something interesting seen right away. Who knows?

So, in a nutshell, I think Juno's going to require our patience. The day will come when we have a really nice data set with beautiful advances in our understanding of Jupiter, but it's not going to come in the form of constant wonderful headlines like Cassini gave us at Saturn. It's pretty amazing, and even surprising, that an orbiter is ultimately the type of mission that is giving us data about the depths of Jupiter. And, if one flyby could have done this fairly well, they might have launched a flyby mission and saved a ton of money.

[tanjent]

Yes, thanks. I certainly did not mean to imply that I could make heads or tails of the raw data, whether in real time or otherwise. But some occasional commentary about what is being learned from the raw data would be welcome prior to the end of the mission. I'm sure the journals have their own opinions about that, though, along with the means to enforce them.

[Gerald]

There have been and will be intermediate updates on conferences and via papers, well before EOM.
Some preliminary results have been presented on the recent press conference, summarized in this news release.
I'd expect raw data of most instruments to be released about one year after they've been taken.

Edit: You might also like to read this BAA article to learn more about the most recent topic of interest on Jupiter.

[PhilipTerryGraha...]

Has there been any word from the Juno team at all as to what exactly caused the spacecraft to go into safe mode during Perijove 2? All I've heard is that it was unrelated to the engine anomaly.

[Explorer1]

There was an issue with JIRAM. That's why it was turned off while they put in a software patch.

http://www.space.com/35043-juno-safe-mode-...ent-glitch.html

[PhilipTerryGraha...]

Ahh yikes. I guess that also explains why JIRAM wasn't turned on for Perijove 3.

[mcaplinger]

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.

[vjkane]

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-j...rbit-at-jupiter

An article by SpaceNews says that the original mission's goals can be met by extending the mission to 2021 (approval for an extended mission would need to come in mid 2018). By using smaller thrusters, the orbit can be tweaked to avoid eclipses.




SpaceNews

[stevesliva]

Might be some interesting end of mission scenarios with all that extra propellant in a few years.

[Explorer1]

If the main engine stays inoperable how would Juno be deorbited anyway?

My favourite alternative: raising the perijove to Io orbit for impact. No PP concerns, and checking the resurfacing rate by leaving a crater of known origin, in addition to being the first contact with a Galilean moon. I'm sure a certain Io enthusiast on this board has some thoughts.

[Tom Tamlyn]

A tweet from Laurie Cantillo quotes Scot Bolton (Juno PI) as saying: "We thought we understood Jupiter, but we didn't. It's going to be very different from what we thought."

I didn't find any abstracts related to Juno on today's program, but Bolton did drop some new (to me, at least) tidbits in an interview on Texas Public Radio.

We don't see anything that looks like a core. There may be a core of heavy elements in there, but it might not be all concentrated in the middle. So that was the first picture that started to go out the window. And we started to say, you know, what would the core be like? Maybe it's much larger? Maybe it's half the size of Jupiter? How could that be?

The whole thing looks different than what anyone thought. I mean every way we have looked, we have been shocked by what what we've seen ….
...
And that is a really big deal. We don't know much about giant planets is what we realized. And if they're built differently than we think, then it means maybe we don't understand how solar systems are made up in the first place …."

More at the link: http://tpr.org/post/juno-spacecraft-rewrit...upiter#stream/0

(originally posted in wrong thread by accident, apologies to those who end up reading it twice.)

[Gerald]

I didn't find any abstracts related to Juno ...

I just received a notification from EGU about the Juno talks on EGU2017.

[JRehling]

My jaw is dropping over Tom's post about preliminary findings. No indication of a core? Not what I was expecting. So maybe a distributed core? Wow.

A few years back I read some astronomical research papers from the late 1800s. I encountered one debate that had pretty much died out long before any of the books that I'd ever read had been printed. This conundrum about Jupiter (and Saturn) went as follows: Given their densities, they must be made primarily out of hydrogen and helium. But gas compresses exponentially with altitude, so if they're all gas, and they have density like STP anywhere near the top of those atmospheres, the exponential increase in density should make these worlds ridiculously dense – more than metal – over most of their volume. So their observed density doesn't permit a model in which they are made out of those gases – or anything else for that matter.

This thinking was naive, and we've certainly moved past it, but it may turn out that we hadn't latched onto any correct model, either.

I'll note: Solar-sized stars tend to have giant planets with probability proportional to their metallicity, which is a finding that suggested that cores of heavier elements (perhaps mainly oxygen) are important components of giant planets. We can't explore any of those planets up close, but Juno is giving us the answers regarding Jupiter now… or at least a new bunch of puzzling questions.

[mcaplinger]

My jaw is dropping over Tom's post about preliminary findings.

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.