Skip to main content

NASA’s Juno spacecraft will celebrate July 4 with a series of super-close Jupiter flybys

Jupiter: Into the Unknown (NASA Juno Mission Trailer)
On Independence Day, while you’re grilling burgers and guzzling beer, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will boost its main engine for half an hour and dip into Jovian orbit, breaking records and taking data during 37 consecutive close approaches.

Jupiter is shrouded in dense clouds. By flying just 2,900 miles above the cloud layer, Juno will pass closer to the gas giant than any prior spacecraft, smashing NASA’s Pioneer 11 record by 18,000 miles. From this distance, Juno will be able to examine Jupiter’s auroras and offer scientists insight into the planet’s origin, structure, atmosphere, and magnetosphere.

Recommended Videos

But nearness comes at a cost. “We are not looking for trouble, we are looking for data,” Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a NASA press release. “Problem is, at Jupiter, looking for the kind of data Juno is looking for, you have to go in the kind of neighborhoods where you could find trouble pretty quick.”

Jupiter’s caustic, clay-colored clouds aren’t necessarily the source of worry. Beneath the top cloud layer, highly pressurized, metallic hydrogen creates a kind of electrical conductor, which — along with Jupiter’s rotation — scientists think creates a magnetic field with tons of high-energy particles and some of the most intense radiation in the whole solar system.

“Over the life of the mission, Juno will be exposed to the equivalent of over 100 million dental X-rays,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “But, we are ready. We designed an orbit around Jupiter that minimizes exposure to Jupiter’s harsh radiation environment. This orbit allows us to survive long enough to obtain the tantalizing science data that we have traveled so far to get.”

To defend against this radiation, NASA equipped Juno with a customized, 400-pound titanium skull within which the ship’s electronic wiring is more or less protected. While the more exposed wiring would hardly last one flyby, the skull gives Juno’s wiring a lifespan of some 20 months. Still, the most dangerous time for Juno will be the beginning, when its initial entrance into Jupiter’s orbit will either make or break the mission.

Dyllan Furness
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
NASA addresses the crack in the hatch of the Crew-8 spacecraft
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission launches from Kennedy Space Center at 10:53 p.m. EST on Sunday, March 3, 2024.

NASA and SpaceX have sent off the latest batch of astronauts to visit the International Space Station, with the launch of the Crew-8 mission late last night. The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launched from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida just before 11 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 3, but there was a risk during that the launch might have been cancelled due to a crack discovered in the hatch seal of the spacecraft around 30 minutes before liftoff.

This morning, NASA shared further details about the crack and why they were confident in letting the launch go ahead.

Read more
NASA and Russian satellites just miss in ‘too close for comfort’ pass
An illustration of NASA's TIMED satellite.

There’s already enough hazardous debris in orbit, but on Wednesday, an incident occurred that almost created a whole lot more.

It involved NASA’s operational TIMED satellite and the defunct Russian Cosmos 2221 satellite, which came alarmingly close to colliding about 378 miles (608 kilometers) above Earth.

Read more
One last orbit: how and why NASA kills its own spacecraft
An artist's rendition of the NEOWISE spacecraft shows it in orbit above the earth.

For more than a decade, NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has been searching the sky for near-Earth objects. Using its infrared vision, the spacecraft, which sits in orbit above Earth's surface, has looked out for asteroids and comets throughout the solar system and has been used to identify those that could come close to Earth.

You might recognize the name because it was used for one of the mission's discoveries, comet NEOWISE, which was the brightest comet in over 20 years when it zipped past Earth in 2020.

Read more