Here’s a fantastic look at launch day for the Juno spacecraft, now on its way to Jupiter. It’s hard not to get pumped up for the mission after watching the Atlas V rocket blast into space, sending Juno on its journey. This video is courtesy the United Launch Alliance (ULA). Universe Today will have more original videos from launch day soon from our team of photographers and videographers who were on hand at Kennedy Space Center.
Juno Blasts off on Science Trek to Discover Jupiter’s Genesis
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NASA’s solar powered Juno spacecraft blasted off today (Aug.5)from Cape Canaveral today to begin a 2.8 billion kilometer science trek to discover the genesis of Jupiter hidden deep inside the planet’s interior.
Upon arrival at Jupiter in July 2016, JUNO will fire its braking rockets and go into polar orbit and circle the planet 33 times over about one year. The goal is to find out more about the planets origins, interior structure and atmosphere, observe the aurora, map the intense magnetic field and investigate the existence of a solid planetary core.
The spacecraft is healthy and the solar panels successfully deployed.
Check out the photo album of Juno’s launch from the Universe Today team of Alan Walters and Ken Kremer.
“Jupiter is the Rosetta Stone of our solar system,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “It is by far the oldest planet, contains more material than all the other planets, asteroids and comets combined and carries deep inside it the story of not only the solar system but of us. Juno is going there as our emissary — to interpret what Jupiter has to say.”
Juno was launched atop a powerful Atlas V rocket augmented by 5 solid rocket boosters – built by United Launch Alliance
“Today, with the launch of the Juno spacecraft, NASA began a journey to yet another new frontier,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “The future of exploration includes cutting-edge science like this to help us better understand our solar system and an ever-increasing array of challenging destinations.”
Atlas V liftoff with JUNO to Jupiter on Aug. 5 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Credit: Ken Kremer
Atlas V liftoff with JUNO to Jupiter on Aug. 5 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Credit: Ken Kremer (kenkremer.com)
JUNO blasts off for Jupiter on Aug. 5 atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 12:25 p.m. EDT.
Credit: Ken Kremer (kenkremer.com)
Send Ken your Juno launch photos to post at Universe Today
Read my continuing features about Juno
Juno Jupiter Orbiter poised at Launch Pad for Aug. 5 Blastoff
JUNO Orbiter Mated to Mightiest Atlas rocket for Aug. 5 Blastoff to Jupiter
Solar Powered Jupiter bound JUNO lands at Kennedy Space Center
Watch Juno Launch Live!
Live video for mobile from Ustream
NASA’s new science probe to Jupiter, Juno, will make its first launch attempt on Friday, Aug. 5 at 15:34 UT (11:34 a.m. EDT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Watch it live on NASA TV’s UStream channel.
Juno Jupiter Orbiter poised at Launch Pad for Aug. 5 Blastoff
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The Atlas V rocket that will power NASA’s new Juno science probe to Jupiter was rolled out to the launch pad at Space Launch Complex 41 and now sits poised for blastoff on Friday, Aug. 5 at 15:34 UT (11:34 a.m. EDT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The Atlas V booster rocket was pushed out of its protective hanger, known as the Vertical Integration Facility, and towards Pad 41 this morning starting at 8:01 a.m. and took about 40 minutes to reach its destination.
Weather forecasters continues to call for a 70 percent chance of favorable conditions at launch time, but the approach of Tropical Storm Emily could throw a wrench in NASA’s plans depending on the track following by the storm over the remaining prelaunch period.
According to continuing weather updates, Emily is dissipating.
Managers approved Juno for flight at this morning’s Launch Readiness Review. The 4 ton Juno spacecraft will embark on a five year trek to Jupiter, our solar system’s largest planet and seek to understand the ingredients necessary for planetary formations.
Juno is perched inside a 5 meter diameter payload fairing and mated to the most powerful version of the Atlas V rocket – an Atlas 551 – with 2.4 million pounds of liftoff thrust. The 20 story tall Atlas 551 uses a standard Atlas booster with five solid rocket boosters in the first stage and a single engine Centaur in the second stage.
The launch window extends for 69 minutes.
The Atlas V is built by United Launch Alliance (ULA).
Juno will orbit Jupiter 33 times and search for 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. Each orbit lasts 11 days
The spacecraft will provide the first detailed glimpse of Jupiter’s poles via a specially designed camera. The elliptical orbit will allow Juno to avoid most of Jupiter’s harsh radiation regions that can severely damage the spacecraft systems.
See my photo album from the launch pad published here.
Read my continuing features about Juno
JUNO Orbiter Mated to Mightiest Atlas rocket for Aug. 5 Blastoff to Jupiter
Solar Powered Jupiter bound JUNO lands at Kennedy Space Center for blastoff
JUNO Orbiter Mated to Mightiest Atlas rocket for Aug. 5 Blastoff to Jupiter
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In less than one week’s time, NASA’s $1.1 Billion Juno probe will blast off on the most powerful Atlas V rocket ever built and embark on a five year cruise to Jupiter where it will seek to elucidate the mysteries of the birth and evolution of our solar system’s largest planet and how that knowledge applies to the remaining planets.
The stage was set for Juno’s liftoff on August 5 at 11:34 a.m. after the solar-powered spacecraft was mated atop the Atlas V rocket at Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral and firmly bolted in place at 10:42 a.m. EDT on July 27.
“We’re about to start our journey to Jupiter to unlock the secrets of the early solar system,” said Scott Bolton, the mission’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “After eight years of development, the spacecraft is ready for its important mission.”
The launch window for Juno extends from Aug. 5 through Aug. 26. The launch time on Aug. 5 opens at 11:34 a.m. EDT and closes at 12:43 p.m. EDT. Juno is the second mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program.
JUNO’s three giant solar panels will unfurl about five minutes after payload separation following the launch, said Jan Chodas, Juno’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.
The probe will cartwheel through space during its five year trek to Jupiter.
Upon arrival in July 2016, JUNO will fire its braking rockets and go into polar orbit and circle Jupiter 33 times over about one year. The goal is to find out more about the planet’s origins, interior structure and atmosphere, observe the aurora, map the intense magnetic field and investigate the existence of a solid planetary core.
“Juno will become the first polar orbiting spacecraft at Jupiter. Not only are we over the poles, but we’re getting closer to Jupiter in our orbit than any other spacecraft has gone,” Bolton elaborated at a briefing for reporters at the Kennedy Space Center. “We’re only 5,000 kilometers above the cloud tops and so we’re skimming right over those cloud tops and we’re actually dipping down beneath the radiation belts, which is a very important thing for us. Because those radiation belts at Jupiter are the most hazardous region in the entire solar system other than going right to the sun itself.”
“Jupiter probably formed first. It’s the largest of all the planets and in fact it’s got more material in it than all the rest of the solar system combined. If I took everything in the solar system except the sun, it could all fit inside Jupiter. So we want to know the recipe.”
Watch for my continuing updates and on-site launch coverage of Juno, only the 2nd probe from Earth to ever orbit Jupiter. Galileo was the first.
Worlds Apart: Planet and Moon Align
Here’s a cool animation showing Mars’ little moon Phobos passing in front of distant Jupiter from the viewpoint of ESA’s Mars Express orbiter:
The conjunction event occurred on June 1.
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Only 21 km (13 miles) across at the widest, the irregularly-shaped Phobos may have been created by a large impact on Mars in its distant past, a chunk of the planet’s crust thrown into orbit. Mars Express most recently performed a close flyby of Phobos back on January 9, passing it at a distance of only 100 km (62 miles).
What’s really amazing to think about is the distances between these two worlds – about 529 million km! But those kinds of distances are no hindrance to vision out in space, especially when the farther object is a giant planet like Jupiter.
The images were taken with Mars Express’ High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which was kept centered on Jupiter during the conjunction. A total of 104 images were taken over a span of 68 seconds to create the animation.
“By knowing the exact moment when Jupiter passed behind Phobos, the observation will help to verify and even improve our knowledge of the orbital position of the martian moon.”
– ESA
Read the news release on the ESA Space Science site here.
All images shown here were processed at the Department of Planetary Sciences and Remote Sensing at the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Freie Universität Berlin. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
New Movie Revives Old Voyager Data of Jupiter’s Clouds
I remember, some time after Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter, of seeing a television show that played a movie of Jupiter’s bands of rolling clouds. I was mesmerized. Now, UnmannedSpaceflight.com member Bjorn Jonsson has re-mastered that data into a crisp, clear video. I find it just as mesmerizing! In his description, Jonsson says, “The movie is based on 58 orange-green-blue color composites obtained on every Jovian rotation from January 6 to January 29, 1979. Over this period Voyager 1’s distance from Jupiter dropped from 58 to 36 million km so the resolution and sharpness of the frames increases from start to finish. The 58 frames were tweened, increasing the number of frames by a factor of 8 (that is, 7 synthetic frames are inserted between each real frame).”
You can see more of Jonsson’s work at his website.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Processed by Bjorn Jonsson
Magma Ocean Flows Beneath Io’s Surface
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Proving that old data never dies, scientists have found something new about Jupiter’s moon Io using data gathered during the Galileo mission, which orbited Jupiter from 1995-2003. New analysis reveals a subsurface ocean of molten or partially molten magma beneath the surface of the volcanic moon, which is the first direct confirmation of this kind of magma layer at Io. Scientists say the molten subsurface ocean explains why the moon is the most volcanic object known in the solar system.
“Scientists are excited we finally understand where Io’s magma is coming from and have an explanation for some of the mysterious signatures we saw in some of the Galileo’s magnetic field data,” said Krishan Khurana, from the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead author of the study published in Science. Khurana was a former co-investigator on Galileo’s magnetometer team at UCLA. “It turns out Io was continually giving off a ‘sounding signal’ in Jupiter’s rotating magnetic field that matched what would be expected from molten or partially molten rocks deep beneath the surface.”
Amazingly, Io produces about 100 times more lava each year than all the volcanoes on Earth, and the new study shows that a global magma ocean exists about 30 to 50 kilometers (20 to 30 miles) beneath the moon’s crust. This explains why Io’s volcanoes are distributed all around its surface, unlike Earth’s volcanoes that occur in localized hotspots like the “Ring of Fire” around the Pacific Ocean.
The volcanoes on Io were discovered in 1979 by Linda Morabito, an optical navigation engineer working on the Voyager mission. Looking at images that were to be used for navigating Voyager, Morabito noted what appeared to be a crescent cloud extending beyond the edge of Io. After conferring with her colleagues, they realized that since Io has no atmosphere, the cloud rising hundreds of kilometers above the surface must be evidence of an incredibly powerful volcano.
The energy for the volcanic activity comes from the squeezing and stretching of the moon by Jupiter’s gravity as Io orbits the largest planet in the solar system.
Galileo was launched in 1989 and began orbiting Jupiter in 1995. Scientists noticed unexplained signatures in magnetic field data from Galileo flybys of Io in October 1999 and February 2000.
“During the final phase of the Galileo mission, models of the interaction between Io and Jupiter’s immense magnetic field, which bathes the moon in charged particles, were not yet sophisticated enough for us to understand what was going on in Io’s interior,” said Xianzhe Jia, a co-author of the study at the University of Michigan.
Recent work in mineral physics showed that a group of rocks known as “ultramafic” rocks become capable of carrying substantial electrical current when melted. Ultramafic rocks are igneous in origin, or form through the cooling of magma. On Earth, they are believed to originate from the mantle. The finding led Khurana and colleagues to test the hypothesis that the strange signature was produced by current flowing in a molten or partially molten layer of this kind of rock.
Tests showed that the signatures detected by Galileo were consistent with a rock such as lherzolite, an igneous rock rich in silicates of magnesium and iron found in Spitzbergen, Norway. The magma ocean layer on Io appears to be more than 50 kilometers (30 miles thick), making up at least 10 percent of the moon’s mantle by volume. The blistering temperature of the magma ocean probably exceeds 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,200 degrees Fahrenheit).
In the animation above, Io is bathed in magnetic field lines (shown in blue) that connect the north polar region of Jupiter to the planet’s south polar region. As Jupiter rotates, the magnetic field lines draping around Io strengthen and weaken. Because Io’s magma ocean has a high electrical conductivity, it deflects the varying magnetic field, shielding the inside of the moon from magnetic disturbances. The magnetic field inside of Io maintains a vertical orientation, even as the magnetic field outside of Io dances around. These variations in the external magnetic field signatures enabled scientists to understand the moon’s internal structure. In the animation, the magnetic field lines move with Jupiter’s rotation period of about 13 hours in Io’s rest frame.
Io is the only body in the solar system other than Earth known to have active magma volcanoes, and it has been suggested both the Earth and its moon may have had similar magma oceans billions of years ago at the time of their formation, but they have long since cooled.
“Io’s volcanism informs us how volcanoes work and provides a window in time to styles of volcanic activity that may have occurred on the Earth and moon during their earliest history,” said Torrence Johnson, a former Galileo project scientist who was not directly involved in the study.
The Galileo spacecraft was intentionally sent into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2003 to avoid any contamination of any of Jupiter’s moons.
Source: JPL
Planets Party In The Morning April 28-May 1
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Set your alarm clocks for an early treat about a half an hour before sunrise on Thursday April 28 through Sunday, May 1, 2011, as there will be a planetary delight in store! Go out and with either a pair of binoculars, a small telescope, or just use your naked eyes and find an unobscured view of the Eastern horizon to see a conjunction (objects near each other in the sky) of the planets Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, below and to the left of the thin crescent moon.
Bright Venus will be easy to spot first, then Mercury followed by Jupiter. The real challenge is to find Mars which will be very close to Jupiter. See the above diagram for help on where each object is located.
If you are unlucky on the first morning, try again the following day for a chance to see this rare planetary occurrence.
While observing this close to the Sun take care and never look at the sun directly with your eyes and never through an optical instrument, as this will permanently damage your eyesight or blind you!
Only special purpose made solar telescopes and filters are safe for viewing the sun.
Solar Powered Jupiter bound JUNO lands at Kennedy Space Center for blastoff
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Juno, NASA’s next big mission bound for the outer planets, has arrived at the Kennedy Space Center to kick off the final leg of launch preparations in anticipation of blastoff for Jupiter this summer.
The huge solar-powered Juno spacecraft will skim to within 4800 kilometers (3000 miles) of the cloud tops of Jupiter to study the origin and evolution of our solar system’s largest planet. Understanding the mechanism of how Jupiter formed will lead to a better understanding of the origin of planetary systems around other stars throughout our galaxy.
Juno will be spinning like a windmill as it fly’s in a highly elliptical polar orbit and investigates the gas giant’s origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere with a suite of nine science instruments.
During the five year cruise to Jupiter, the 3,600 kilogram probe will fly by Earth once in 2013 to pick up speed and accelerate Juno past the asteroid belt on its long journey to the Jovian system where it arrives in July 2016.
Juno will orbit Jupiter 33 times and search for 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.
The mission will provide the first detailed glimpse of Jupiter’s poles and is set to last approximately one year. The elliptical orbit will allow Juno to avoid most of Jupiter’s harsh radiation regions that can severely damage the spacecraft systems.
Juno was designed and built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, and air shipped in a protective shipping container inside the belly of a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster cargo jet to the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Fla.
This week the spacecraft begins about four months of final functional testing and integration inside the climate controlled clean room and undergoes a thorough verification that all its systems are healthy. Other processing work before launch includes attachment of the long magnetometer boom and solar arrays which arrived earlier.
Juno is the first solar powered probe to be launched to the outer planets and operate at such a great distance from the sun. Since Jupiter receives 25 times less sunlight than Earth, Juno will carry three giant solar panels, each spanning more than 20 meters (66 feet) in length. They will remain continuously in sunlight from the time they are unfurled after launch through the end of the mission.
“The Juno spacecraft and the team have come a long way since this project was first conceived in 2003,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator, based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, in a statement. “We’re only a few months away from a mission of discovery that could very well rewrite the books on not only how Jupiter was born, but how our solar system came into being.”
Juno is slated to launch aboard the most powerful version of the Atlas V rocket – augmented by 5 solid rocket boosters – from Cape Canaveral, Fla. on August 5. The launch window extends through August 26. Juno is the second mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program.
NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover will follow Juno to the Atlas launch pad, and is scheduled to liftoff in late November 2011. Read my stories about Curiosity here and here.
Because of cuts to NASA’s budget by politicians in Washington, the long hoped for mission to investigate the Jovian moon Europa may be axed, along with other high priority science missions. Europa may harbor subsurface oceans of liquid water and is a prime target in NASA’s search for life beyond Earth.
