Month: October 2013

Jovian Joviality: Juno is a Healthy Spaceship, On-Track for 2016 Jupiter Rendezvous

Artist's impression of the Juno flyby (NASA)
Artist’s impression of the Juno flyby (NASA)

Last week’s Juno flyby of Earth was an exciting event. NASA’s Jupiter-bound mission buzzed our planet on Wednesday (Oct. 9) only 350 miles from the surface, providing amateur astronomers with an opportunity to snapshot Juno as she flew past, stealing a little momentum from Earth and sling-shotting toward the largest planet in the Solar System. Alas, the flyby event wasn’t without incident.

The spacecraft dropped into “safe mode” shortly after its terrestrial encounter. Safe mode is a fail safe on spacecraft that protects onboard instruments from an unexpected condition. This can come in the form of a power spike or some other instrumental error. It is not known at this time what triggered this particular event, but the upshot is that Juno is back in its nominal state.

From a Southwest Research Institute news release:

“Onboard Juno, the safe mode turned off instruments and a few non-critical spacecraft components, and pointed the spacecraft toward the Sun to ensure the solar arrays received power. The spacecraft acted as expected during the transition into and while in safe mode.”

Juno’s planned trajectory was not impacted during the flyby and it is expected to make orbital insertion around Jupiter in July 2016.

The mission was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 2011 and, through a wonderful bit of orbital mechanics, was commanded to do one 2-year orbit around the Sun. Then, last week, it ended up where it started to use our planet as a speed booster, flinging it further out into the Solar System toward Jupiter’s orbit. This acceleration “freebie” was needed as the launch vehicle, an Atlas V rocket, didn’t have the oomph to propel the spacecraft deeper into space.

Once Juno arrives at Jupiter, it will give the gas giant a thorough full-body examination, investigating what lies beneath its clouds, how it generates its powerful magnetic field and how it evolved. The repercussions of Juno’s one-year primary mission will hopefully expose not only how Jupiter is formed, but how Earth evolved into its current state.

As Juno sped past on Wednesday, I allowed myself an early celebration of some fine flying by NASA scientists with a Gin & Tonic (or a Juno & Tonic) in my special JPL-bought Juno glasses.

Good luck Juno, will look forward to seeing you at Jupiter in a little under three years time!

MORE: Read my Discovery News post about the possibility of Juno exhibiting the mysterious “flyby anomaly.”

Curiosity Obsessing: Odd Mars Rock in Gale Crater

Panorama mosaic taken by Curiosity's Mastcam on Sol 413 of its mission inside Gale Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Panorama mosaic taken by Curiosity’s Mastcam on Sol 413 of its mission inside Gale Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, edit by Ian O’Neill

As NASA has been shuttered by the insane U.S. government shutdown, there’s been little in the way of news releases from NASA (site offline) or NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (site still online, but no recent updates posted). In this Mars Science Laboratory science lull, I’ve found myself obsessively trawling the mission’s raw image archive so I can get my fix of high-resolution imagery from Curiosity’s ongoing mission inside Gale Crater.

While getting lost in the Martian landscape once more, I started tinkering with Curiosity’s raw photos; zooming in, adjusting the contrast, brightness and color. One thing led to another and I found myself stitching together various photos from the rover’s Mastcam camera. Being awash with photographs with little professional insight from mission scientists (as, you know, a noisy minority at Capitol Hill has gagged them by starving the agency of funds), I started to tinker in Photoshop, blindly trying to stitch a selection of Mastcam photos together to see an updated Martian panorama once more. This is the result.

Of particular interest, I found myself staring at the precariously-shaped boulder to the far right of the panorama. I can only guess what geological processes shaped it that way — Wind action? Ancient water flow? — or whether it had simply landed that way after getting blasted from an impact crater, but I was curious as to what JPL mission scientists are making of it. Alas, we’ll have to wait a little longer for the awesome Mars science to begin flowing again.

Here’s that rock:

curiosity-pano-mastcam-sol-413-131009-ins

It felt nice to be absorbed in the Mars landscape again. The photo stitching is rough in places (by far the hardest task was getting the brightness and contrast correct in each photo) and I lack any calibration tools to ensure the color is correct or that the orientation is sound, but it satisfied my curiosity as to what Curiosity was up to on the Red Planet. It has, after all, been over a year since the historic landing of the NASA mission and the regular news updates from NASA and JPL have become something of an intellectual opiate.

Going cold turkey, apparently, makes a space blogger itchy.

Image sources (from left to right):
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707000000E1_DXXX&s=413
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707001000E1_DXXX&s=413
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707002000E1_DXXX&s=413
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707003000E1_DXXX&s=413
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707004000E1_DXXX&s=413