NASA’s Juno space probe left Earth in 2011 and entered orbit around the planet Jupiter in July 2016. Since then, it has revolved around it, periodically flying close by. Its mission also includes flybys of some of the moons around the planet.
Juno gets power for its onboard systems from solar panels, a challenge given its distance from the Sun is five times greater than it is from Earth.
But even greater is the challenge of withstanding the high radiation prevailing near Jupiter. This environment is one of the most radiant in the entire solar system and tremendously deadly for humans. To protect the most vulnerable ship systems, it was decided to protect them within a kind of shell. This makes it possible to intercept a good part of the radiation. But the risk is not zero, as demonstrated by a small odyssey that the Juno has recently experienced.
Juno passed very close to Jupiter on December 14. That was its 47th flyby. Later, while the spacecraft was sending its scientific data from its onboard computer to the mission control center on Earth, the data link was unexpectedly interrupted.
It was impossible to directly access the memory where the spacecraft had stored the scientific data collected during the flyby.
Everything indicated that Juno had suffered a radiation spike while flying through a particularly dangerous sector of Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft hovering over Jupiter’s south pole. (Illustration: NASA JPL/Caltech)
Mission control center staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and their collaborators were able to successfully reboot the spacecraft’s computer and, on December 17, put Juno into safe mode, a state of precaution in which only essential systems work.
As of December 22, operations to retrieve the data collected during the flyby began yielding positive results, and the team resumed downloading the scientific data.
There is no indication that the scientific data collected during the closest approach to Jupiter, or during the spacecraft’s flyby of Io, a moon of Jupiter located in an area also dangerous for its radiation, has been corrupted.
The rest of the scientific data collected during the flyby is expected to be sent back to Earth in the next few days, at which time its status will be verified.
The ship is expected to come out of safe mode in about a week.
Juno’s next flyby of Jupiter will take place on January 22, 2023. (Source: NCYT de Amazings)