Juno Update: JunoCam’s First Peek
By Gus Herrera
Although Pasadena may be known for roses and parades, this quiet LA suburb is home to a place where history-making work is undertaken each and every day.
Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will once again play a critical role in this country’s great space program. NASA’s newest mission, InSight, which is set to launch in spring of 2018, aims to explore the interior of Mars and help humanity understand how rocky planets form and evolve.
JPL will be responsible for engineering the mission’s primary instrument, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), which is “designed to measure ground movements as small as half the radius of a hydrogen atom,” according to a statement released by NASA last week.
NASA revealed the mission’s launch period is set for May 5, 2018, “with a Mars landing scheduled for Nov. 26, 2018.”
The mission was originally scheduled to blast-off March 2016, but technical difficulties with the SEIS postponed the project. JPL is tasked with fixing this issue – NASA has assigned Pasadena’s brightest scientists and engineers the duty of “redesigning, developing, and qualifying the instrument’s evacuated container and the electrical feedthroughs that failed previously.” France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales and the German Aerospace Center will also contribute to the project.
The InSight mission will be the next in the long line of NASA’s un-manned missions to Mars, the most recent of which launched in 2013. InSight will hopefully lay the groundwork for human trips by answering critical questions regarding the red planet’s composition and history, “Our robotic scientific explorers such as InSight are paving the way toward an ambitious journey to send humans to the red planet,” said Geoff Yoder, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, “It’s gratifying that we are moving forward with this important mission to help us better understand the origins of Mars and all the rocky planets, including Earth.”
The mission originally cost $675 million, but the delay resulting from the SEIS redesign will increase the price tag by another $153.8 million. The spacecraft that will transport InSight to Mars was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, Co. In addition to re-building the primary technology, JPL will also manage the InSight project.
In other inter-galactic Pasadena news, the Juno mission, which historically reached Jupiter on July 4, “successfully executed the first of 36 orbital flybys on Aug. 27 when the spacecraft came about 2,500 miles above Jupiter’s swirling cloud,” according to a statement released by NASA.
The mission’s name refers to Roman mythological goddess Juno, who used her powers to see through the clouds her husband Jupiter cast in order to hide his mischievous acts.
The spacecraft, which was also built by Lockheed Martin, is equipped with several state-of-the-art instruments to capture its findings. The JunoCam snapped first-ever images of Jupiter’s north and south poles. Additionally, the Jovian Infared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), began to do what the mission was intended to do … peek below the cloudy surface, “JIRAM is getting under Jupiter’s skin, giving us our first infrared close-ups of the planet,” said Alberto Adriani, JIRAM co-investigator from Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome.
JIRAM also revealed Jupiter’s southern aurora, a phenomenon never seen before, “we were amazed to see it for the first time. No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see [it] … The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the aurora’s morphology and dynamics.”
More information and images will continue to make their way back to Earth as the Juno mission unfolds.
READ MORE: www.nasa.gov/juno or www.missionjuno/org.
