NASA's Juno On Track To Make It To Jupiter By July 4th
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — NASA's Juno spacecraft is about to enter Jupiter's orbit and will explore the giant planet's atmosphere for the first time.
Juno's journey began in 2011 and the spacecraft has covered 1.8 billion miles.
Juno will get within about 3,100 miles of Jupiter's clouds. If it got any closer, the pull from Jupiter's atmosphere could wreak havoc on the spacecraft's experiments. Juno's flight computer and other sensitive equipment is housed in a titanium vault.
The Jupiter mission will last about 20 months. that's about as long as Juno will be able to last in the harsh radiation field. That radiation will eventually force the spacecraft to plunge to the planet's surface.
Engineers will continue to monitor the trajectory and the health of Juno's systems, but at Jupiter's distance from Earth -- 540 million miles -- it will take radio signals 48 minutes and 19 seconds to reach flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
On Sunday, CBS2's Greg Mills spoke to Scott Bolton, the chief scientist heading up the Juno project for JPL
Juno is racing through space at 130,000 miles per hour. Tomorrow evening, there is a 35-minute window to slow the aircraft down enough to get it safely into Jupiter's orbit
"Everything's riding on this 35 minutes tomorrow," Bolton says. Specifically, from 8:18 p.m. to 8:53 p.m. PST the flight engineers will hopefully pull off the procedure.
"It's a very complicated procedure. Everything's got to go just right or we fly right past the planet," Bolton said.
Bolton and his team are confident they will pull it off.
"It's a total deal-breaker if we miss it," he says.
Bolton says long before the Juno launched he has been dreaming of this moment.
"I've been dreaming about something like this for 15, 20 years," he says.
