Juno spacecraft completes close swing around Jupiter
Last edited Sun Aug 28, 2016, 08:02 AM - Edit history (1)
Juno spacecraft completes close swing around Jupiter
By/ William Harwood/ CBS News/ August 27, 2016, 10:49 PM
During approach to Jupiter, NASA’s Juno
spacecraft captured this image of the
giant planet’s north polar region and
great red spot.
/ NASA
Braving intense radiation, NASA’s Juno spacecraft successfully completed its first low-altitude swing around Jupiter early Saturday, passing within about 2,600 miles of the giant planet’s cloud tops at a velocity of some 130,000 mph, the space agency said.
A single image posted on NASA’s Juno web page showed a half-lighted Jupiter and its great red spot, along with numerous atmospheric bands and swirls. Much higher resolution images are expected to be posted in the next few weeks as mission scientists process downlinked data and telemetry.
“Early post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders,” Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a NASA statement.
Scott Bolton, the Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said “we are in an orbit nobody has ever been in before, and these images give us a whole new perspective on this gas-giant world.”
More:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/juno-spacecraft-completes-close-swing-around-jupiter/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Looking forward to seeing some results.
R&K
