The real problem is that the mailbox is blocks away and you have a wide angle lens that was designed to shoot the big mansion that you will be repeatedly driving right in front of.

Maybe, but with good camera you can do it. And I think, that JIRAM (imaging spectrometer for JUNO) is push-broom device, so this isn't impossible. All this is analyzed by volcanopele here http://gishbar.blogspot.com/2009/01/juno-io.html.

I'm not following this analogy very well (don't all flybys work like that?), but Junocam can image anything within +/-35 degrees or so off the spin plane. As others have said, the issue is more that you'd have to be very close to a moon to get anything worthwhile given Junocam's low resolution.

NASA has just put the JUNO launch on the KSC launch schedule, NASA's Shuttle and Rocket Launch Schedule

August 5, 2011

Last time I checked, the reference trajectory in the Horizons system had a launch date of 18 Aug 2011. Good to see this mission get off the ground .. 2855 days and 5.7 billion km flight distance (w.r.t. Sun) to go until planned Jupiter atmospheric entry on 16 Oct 2017

This probably has to do with the conflict with the MSL launch. I guess the Juno folks are going to try and get off the pad as soon as they possibly can.

Every day counts with regards to the Juno / MSL launch conflict ... see http://www.lpi.usra.edu/pss/jan92009/prese...reenmslSlip.pdf slides 8 onwards. Interesting stuff.

looking at the sheet http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/37654/1/05-2760.pdf, JUNO seems to pass closer to the north pole than the south one on every orbit. Will this difference in altitude (hence in resolution) affect the results of the mission?

IMHO the southward moving apsides will make us miss some (maybe) important small-scale features in south pole.

Shift the orbit to be equal and you might miss some maybe important small-scale features in the North Pole. Which pole is better illuminated during the prime mission, for example?

It's all a compromise about what's possible, what's simple, what's functional and what's beneficial for science.

Jupiter has very little axial tilt, though. I'd bet the actual reason relates to the amount of delta-V required for a smaller orbit. More delta-V means less mass for instruments, and, as Doug says, it's a compromise.

--Greg

Remember Juno's not an imaging mission; its main goals are getting at Jupiter's internal structure through gravity, magnetometer data, etc. The mission is designed to permit it to probe Jupiter's gravity and other fields at a wide variety of distances from the planet, to map things out in 3D. It's only carrying a camera at all because people like us would be pretty annoyed if a spacecraft went to Jupiter without one

I'm sure Juno's scientific results will be revelatory - but I still feel kind of sad that they are not going with a decent camera system.

It isn't a bad camera, and if you don't have a wavelength bias, Juno has an very nice imaging UV spectrometer.

Very true. This should be an exciting mission both visually and scientifically.

That will excite the insectoids among us.
Click to view attachment

Don't forget italian infrared camera/spectrometer!

It's based on the MSL/MARDI

Given how close the orbiter comes to Jupiter and the size of Jupiter, the camera is well sized to the task. I just wish they had included a near-IR filter to see lower into the cloud decks.

I will echo machi's response here: "Don't forget italian infrared camera/spectrometer" It will look up to 5 micron, where you can see quite low.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18680411

Full inline quote removed - ADMIN

Quite true, but there's a big gap between red (~0.65 microns) and the 2 micron minimum on the Italian infrared camera/spectrometer. The JunoCAM's CCD almost certainly covers the near infrared (~0.8 micros), but it probably wasn't worth the cost of validating the camera with an additional filter (or the design couldn't spare the extra rows for another filter assuming that the filters are applied directly to the CCD). It would have been nice since I believe JunoCAM may have higher spatial resolution (the Italian instrument has a 10 nm resolution; can anyone compare that to JunoCAM's resolution?)

This presentation includes lots of details of the Italian camera, including some simulated images

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/new...no20100405.html

Juno Taking Shape in Denver

Assembly has begun on NASA's Juno spacecraft, which will help scientists understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. The mission, whose principal investigator is Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Tex., is expected to launch in August 2011 and reach Jupiter in 2016.

The assembly, testing and launch operations phase began April 1 in a high-bay clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver. Engineers and technicians will spend the next few months fitting instruments and navigation equipment onto the spacecraft.

"We're excited the puzzle pieces are coming together," Bolton said. "We're one important step closer to getting to Jupiter."

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. Underneath its dense cloud cover, the planet safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our solar system during its formation. As our primary example of a giant planet, Jupiter can also provide critical knowledge for understanding the planetary systems being discovered around other stars.

Juno will have nine science instruments on board to investigate the existence of a solid planetary core, map Jupiter's intense magnetic field, measure the amount of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere, and observe the planet's auroras.

"We plan to be doing a lot of testing in the next few months," said Jan Chodas, the project manager based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We want to make sure the spacecraft is ready for the long journey to Jupiter and the harsh environment it will encounter there."

JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is building the spacecraft. The Italian Space Agency, Rome, is contributing an infrared spectrometer instrument and a portion of the radio science experiment.

For more information about Juno, visit http://www.nasa.gov/juno.

That wouldn't necessarily stop NASA...the 2013 MAVEN mission to Mars has no camera aboard. We'll have to hope MRO keeps working!

[End thread hijack, back to your regularly scheduled Juno programming. ]

Yes, but Mars has plenty of attendant missions with cameras, some of which will likely overlap MAVEN. Not true for Jupiter.

Juno Armored Up to Go to Jupiter

With guidance from JPL and the principal investigator, engineers at Lockheed Martin Space Systems designed and built a special radiation vault made of titanium for a centralized electronics hub. While other materials exist that make good radiation blockers, engineers chose titanium because lead is too soft to withstand the vibrations of launch, and some other materials were too difficult to work with.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?rele...elease_2010-230

Thanks for the link punkboi.


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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.)

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?

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.

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

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

Wow. I had no idea that perapsis was that low!

Makes me think that possibly no useful imagery will be possible then; the relative velocity's going to be quite high, I assume. Are they considering adopting the Cassini 'skeet-shoot' tactic, perhaps in the XM?

It's not likely Juno will survive for a XM, and imaging science isn't a high priority as far as I know. (I get the strong impression JunoCam was installed kind of as an afterthought)

Even if they plan on having an XM, the JunoCAM won't be around for it. It should die due to radiation damage around halfway through the nominal mission.

Really! That is actually very interesting. The cam's progressive deterioration will in itself provide potentially useful engineering data.

Wow, that is extremely low!

For reference:
Pioneer 10: 132,086 km
Pioneer 11: 42,838 km
Voyager 1: 277,492 km
Voyager 2: 650,272 km
Ulysses: 379,123 km
Galileo: 402,327 km (rough avg)
-219,194 km (closest at arrival),
-71,398 km (closest at final pass of Amalthea),
-and of course entered the atmosphere with a final 0.9 RJ / -7140 km
Cassini: 9.7 million km
New Horizons: 2.2 million km
(Source:NSSDC, PDS)

If nothing else, the unique perspective on the inner moons (Amalthea, Metis and such) will be something to look forward to (if they're planning to look of course).

I just had a quick look using Eyes on the Solar System (it has a baseline Juno trajectory)

CA's to Metis, Amalthea et al are on the order of 30,000 miles. Metis might be 7 pixels across. Amalthea maybe 20-30 pixels. We're talking on the order of 10km/pixel at those distances - and it would have to be a very very fortunate coincidence of geometry for them to even cross Junocams FOV.

Juno's orbit is near polar, remember - and at this time it'll be taking it's principle science data of Jupiter itself.

So close?
Then imaging spectroscopy is theoretically possible (by JIRAM). We haven't usable data from NIMS (Galileo). But these aren't objectives of the Juno mission.

The odds are much better than that: Juno is a spinning spacecraft. Every 30 seconds, JunoCam's field of view will scan out the entire plane perpendicular to the spin axis. It could image anything in that plane. Over the course of a periapsis, that plane slides over most of the inner jovian system. Depending on the orientation of the orbit and the location of the satellites, I'd guess there is about a 50% chance to image any given satellite on a given periapsis. They just need to put in commands to image at the right time and spin phase.

That does not, however, say what the range to the satellite will be. It could be quite distant. In fact, the range to the Galilean satellites is always large on purpose. The observations of Jupiter call for a pretty well-controlled orbit. For example, each periapsis is 192 deg. of longitude from the last (to give an even sampling grid for the magnetic field/internal core measurement.) To do that without using too much fuel, the orbit was designed to avoid the Galilean satellites: Even a distant (e.g. 100,000 km) encounter would perturb the orbit and require additional corrections.



That's true of the mission's science goals, but I'm not sure about JunoCam. It is on the spacecraft for public outreach and education. It isn't tied to the formal mission science requirements. It does get the best view and range of Jupiter, I think its filters reflect that, and I suspect most of the images will be of Jupiter. But if satellite images support JunoCam's outreach and education goals, I'd think they would be taken.

JunoCam and Juno don't do any pointing as such. The spin axis will point either at Earth or perpendicular to the orbital plane (so nadir on Jupiter is in the spin plane.) JunoCam just takes images at a commanded time and a commanded spin phase. So I don't think they can do anything like a skeet shoot. But it also means the smear from the relative velocity is less of a problem than you might think. It's designed to image from a platform spinning at 2 rpm. That's 12 deg. per second. At periapsis, the clouds are 4300 km away and the spacecraft is moving at about 50 km/s. That's about 0.7 deg. per second of smear, not much compared to the smear from spacecraft spin the instrument's built to deal with.