Juno’s Shut Encounter: Unveiling the Secrets and techniques of Jupiter’s Fiery Moon Io

The orbiter has carried out 56 flybys of Jupiter and documented shut encounters with three of the fuel large’s 4 largest moons.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft will on Saturday, December 30, make the closest flyby of Jupiter’s moon Io that any spacecraft has made in over 20 years. Coming inside roughly 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) from the floor of essentially the most volcanic world in our photo voltaic system, the cross is predicted to permit Juno devices to generate a firehose of information.

“By combining information from this flyby with our earlier observations, the Juno science workforce is learning how Io’s volcanoes differ,” mentioned Juno’s principal investigator, Scott Bolton of the Southwest Analysis Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “We’re searching for how usually they erupt, how vivid and sizzling they’re, how the form of the lava move adjustments, and the way Io’s exercise is linked to the move of charged particles in Jupiter’s magnetosphere.”

A second ultra-close flyby of Io is scheduled for February 3, 2024, through which Juno will once more come inside about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the floor.

The spacecraft has been monitoring Io’s volcanic exercise from distances starting from about 6,830 miles (11,000 kilometers) to over 62,100 miles (100,000 kilometers), and has offered the primary views of the moon’s north and south poles. The spacecraft has additionally carried out shut flybys of Jupiter’s icy moons Ganymede and Europa.

This JunoCam picture of Jupiter’s moon Io captures a plume of fabric ejected from the (unseen) volcano Prometheus. Indicated by the crimson arrow, the plume is simply seen within the darkness under the terminator (the road dividing day and night time). The picture was taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on October 15. Credit score: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

“With our pair of shut flybys in December and February, Juno will examine the supply of Io’s large volcanic exercise, whether or not a magma ocean exists beneath its crust, and the significance of tidal forces from Jupiter, that are relentlessly squeezing this tortured moon,” mentioned Bolton.

Now within the third yr of its prolonged mission to analyze the origin of Jupiter, the solar-powered spacecraft may also discover the ring system the place a few of the fuel large’s inside moons reside.

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All three cameras aboard Juno will probably be lively through the Io flyby. The Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), which takes photos in infrared, will probably be gathering the warmth signatures emitted by volcanoes and calderas overlaying the moon’s floor. The mission’s Stellar Reference Unit (a navigational star digital camera that has additionally offered useful science) will get hold of the highest-resolution picture of the floor up to now. And the JunoCam imager will take visible-light coloration photos.

JunoCam was included on the spacecraft for the general public’s engagement and was designed to function for as much as eight flybys of Jupiter. The upcoming flyby of Io will probably be Juno’s 57th orbit round Jupiter, the place the spacecraft and cameras have endured one of many photo voltaic system’s most punishing radiation environments.

“The cumulative results of all that radiation has begun to indicate on JunoCam over the previous few orbits,” mentioned Ed Hirst, undertaking supervisor of Juno at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. “Footage from the final flyby present a discount within the imager’s dynamic vary and the looks of ‘striping’ noise. Our engineering workforce has been engaged on options to alleviate the radiation injury and to maintain the imager going.”

Extra Io, Please

After a number of months of examine and evaluation, the Juno workforce adjusted the spacecraft’s deliberate future trajectory so as to add seven new distant Io flybys (for a complete of 18) to the prolonged mission plan. After the shut Io cross on February 3, the spacecraft will fly by Io each different orbit, with every orbit rising progressively extra distant: The primary will probably be at an altitude of about 10,250 miles (16,500 kilometers) above Io, and the final will probably be at about 71,450 miles (115,000 kilometers).

The gravitational pull of Io on Juno through the December 30 flyby will scale back the spacecraft’s orbit round Jupiter from 38 days to 35 days. Juno’s orbit will drop to 33 days after the February 3 flyby.

After that, Juno’s new trajectory will end in Jupiter blocking the Solar from the spacecraft for about 5 minutes on the time when the orbiter is at its closest to the planet, a interval known as perijove. Though this would be the first time the solar-powered spacecraft has encountered darkness since its flyby of Earth in October 2013, the length will probably be too quick to have an effect on its total operation. Excluding the February 3 perijove, the spacecraft will encounter photo voltaic eclipses like this throughout each shut flyby of Jupiter any further by means of the rest of its prolonged mission, which ends in late 2025.

Beginning in April 2024, the spacecraft will perform a sequence of occultation experiments that use Juno’s Gravity Science experiment to probe Jupiter’s higher atmospheric make-up, which supplies key info on the planet’s form and inside construction.

Extra In regards to the Mission

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott J. Bolton, of the Southwest Analysis Institute in San Antonio. Juno is a part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall House Flight Middle in Huntsville, Alabama, for the company’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin House in Denver constructed and operates the spacecraft.