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

[Explorer1]

Thanks for the link punkboi.

Each titanium wall measures nearly a square meter (nearly 9 square feet) in area, about 1 centimeter (a third of an inch) in thickness, and 18 kilograms (40 pounds) in mass. This titanium box -- about the size of an SUV's trunk - encloses Juno's command and data handling box [...] and about 20 other electronic assemblies. The whole vault weighs about 200 kilograms (500 pounds).

Wow, even with that much protection, the mission is suppose to last barely over a year before deorbiting? This sure puts Galileo's achievements in perspective, doesn't it (different orbit notwithstanding)?

Also, what are those big red things labelled 'remove before flight' sticking on the top of Juno, in that photo?

[Greg Hullender]

I wonder when we'll start seeing regular updates on the Juno mission web site?

http://juno.wisc.edu/index_whatsnew.html

Just one year to launch, so they ought to have things to post now. I realize outreach is often a thankless job, so that's not meant to sound like a complaint. :-)

--Greg

[dmuller]

Also, what are those big red things labelled 'remove before flight' sticking on the top of Juno, in that photo?

If you ask ugordan (post related to Phoenix), the inside of the 'remove before flight' tags look like this

[volcanopele]

An update eh? Well, JEDI looked good when I saw it a couple of hours ago

[Frank Crary]

Wow, even with that much protection, the mission is suppose to last barely over a year before deorbiting? This sure puts Galileo's achievements in perspective, doesn't it (different orbit notwithstanding)?

Also, what are those big red things labelled 'remove before flight' sticking on the top of Juno, in that photo?

Galileo was on a very different orbit. It spent almost no time in the worst parts of the radiation belts. Between orbital insertion and about a year or so into extended mission, Galileo never went inside the orbit of Europa. Juno will be spending a much larger fraction of its time in the high flux parts of Jupiter's magnetosphere. The orbit is designed to avoid that, at first, but the orbit precesses over the course of a year. I think the total, unshielded dose for Juno is estimates at three or four times what they think Galileo was exposed to.

The red tag is on one of the reaction control thruster towers. They probably want the nozzles covered during shipping and handling.

[Explorer1]

The red tag is on one of the reaction control thruster towers. They probably want the nozzles covered during shipping and handling.

Thanks for the answer. I imagine they don't want those parts bumping into anything too much.

[elakdawalla]

They just posted a new Juno artist's concept on Photojournal. It seems to have very minor updates to the one posted in 2009 except for one thing that's kind of inexplicable. It's mirrored relative to the 2009 one. I compared the 2011 one to the 2009 one and it looks to me like it's the 2011 one that's backwards, with the Red Spot rotating in the wrong direction. But I wasn't confident enough about that to send an email to anyone -- can someone here confirm?

[ugordan]

Looks like you're right. The Jupiter map is from Cassini and it's definitely mirrored left-right: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07782.

[Mr. Milton Banan...]

Will there be any investigation of thunderstorm activity, and if so, what kind?

[Frank Crary]

Will there be any investigation of thunderstorm activity, and if so, what kind?

If you mean cloud and storm imaging, I'm pretty sure there is going to be quite a bit of that in the visible and IR. If you mean night-side images of lightning flashes, I don't think that will be possible. During the perijove phase of the orbit, the spacecraft is over the day side. I'm fairly sure JunoCam and JIRAM can't point off nadir at all. I do think we'll get whistler data from Waves. That's caused by lighting and has been used as a measure of overall activity (as well as the source latitude.)

[DrShank]

If you mean cloud and storm imaging, I'm pretty sure there is going to be quite a bit of that in the visible and IR. If you mean night-side images of lightning flashes, I don't think that will be possible. During the perijove phase of the orbit, the spacecraft is over the day side. I'm fairly sure JunoCam and JIRAM can't point off nadir at all. I do think we'll get whistler data from Waves. That's caused by lighting and has been used as a measure of overall activity (as well as the source latitude.)

I think a key advance would be movie making of jupiter atmospheric dynamics, which Galileo could not do and HST is not funded to do. Hope they will have some long stare times! Maybe some Io plume monitoring too?

[machi]

Junocam has too low resolution for some Io plume monitoring, but JIRAM can theoretically image Io with comparable resolution as NIMS imaging spectrometer. So it can detects hot spots and so on.
But Juno is spinning platform so any Io targeting can be only matter of luck, because Io monitoring isn't one of mission's or even instrument's (JIRAM) objectives.

[tedstryk]

Junocam has too low resolution for some Io plume monitoring, but JIRAM can theoretically image Io with comparable resolution as NIMS imaging spectrometer. So it can detects hot spots and so on.
But Juno is spinning platform so any Io targeting can be only matter of luck, because Io monitoring isn't one of mission's or even instrument's (JIRAM) objectives.

Other than maybe detect some gross albedo changes near the polar regions that are always highly foreshortened to earth-based telescopes, it is unlikely Junocam will do much with Io.

[ZLD]

Whats the expected pariapsis of Juno? Will cloud shadows be visible at that range?

[djellison]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)

CODE

Orbital elements
Regime    Polar
Periapsis    4300 km (2671 miles)