spacecraft Juno failed on Tuesday come into the orbit of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, successfully completing the most dangerous moment of the mission. After five years of space travel, the probe of US space agency NASA will now gather information about various features of Jupiter-like atmosphere, the inner composition and magnetosphere, a mission that cost around EUR 990 million.
“We are there! We are in orbit! Conquered Jupiter, “said Scott Bolton, the mission coordinator, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, quoted by Reuters. “Now comes the fun part.”
They were 20h53 Monday in California (4:53 a.m. Tuesday at dawn in Lisbon) when the mission control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Jet (JPL, acronym in English), NASA, received the signal from the Juno , triggering a wave of applause from the scientists who accompanied the mission.
“the Independence Day is always something to be celebrated, but today we can join the birthday of the United States another reason to cheer – the Juno came to Jupiter, “said Charlie Bolden, NASA administrator, referring to the July 4 .
the probe had to be in the right place to turn its main engine and keep it on for 35 minutes to reduce its speed, which allowed it to be captured in orbit around Jupiter, NASA said in a statement. If there was any flaw in this movement, the probe would fail the planet, and would be the end of the mission.
“The insertion into Jupiter’s orbit was a big step and the biggest challenge still had overcome in our plan” said Rick Nybakken, one of the leaders of JPL’s mission, explaining that the instruments worked perfectly. But the scientific phase will not start now. “There are other steps that have to occur before the science team can receive in the hands the mission that both want,” he added, quoted in a statement from NASA.
In the coming months, they will be made the last tests to probe subsystems, in addition to calibrations to eight scientific instruments and a camera. Still, the first images of Jupiter will be already obtained August 17, advances to Reuters, and scientific instruments will begin to do science earlier than expected.
“The official stage of scientific collection initiatives in October, but we found a way to collect information well before, “said Scott Bolton, in a statement from NASA. Then they will begin the 33 scientific orbits. The mission will last 20 months and will end with the Juno to bid us farewell, plunging into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
After Pioneer 10 Jupiter has been visited by Pioneer 11 in 1974, the two probes Voyager in 1979, the probe Ulysses in 1992, the probe Galileo , which reached the planet in 1995 and by 2003 was to study the giant and its moons, the Cassini-Huygens in 2000 and, more recently, the New Horizons , which made a flight of three months with Jupiter in 2007, before heading to Pluto. So after Galileo , Juno is the second device exclusively designed to peer into this giant.
The probe left Earth on August 5 2011, made a circular motion which passed the orbit of Mars back to Earth and took advantage of the impetus given by its gravity to finally travel to Jupiter, traveling in these four years and 11 months 2800 million kilometers.
to say that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system is not enough to understand its size. Jupiter is huge: it is three times larger than Saturn is 11 times the diameter of Earth (12,756 kilometers) and 122 times its surface area. Only the Great Red Spot, an epic atmospheric storm of red colors that exist in the southern hemisphere, visible in photographs of the Space Telescope Hubble and astronomers go to monitor at least since the nineteenth century, now has about 16,000 kilometers in diameter. The Earth would fit in there, no problem.
Jupiter’s mass is greater than the mass of all other bodies in the solar system except the sun. At night, its brightness is surpassed only by Venus, the Moon and sometimes by Mars.
Although the ground-based telescopes have made it known to many astronomers colors of the planet, were the probe photographs of NASA Pioneer 10, the first who crossed the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter, and near photographed the giant 4 December 1973, which allowed to look more close to the Jovian atmosphere. The iconic white and brown clear bands, which now immediately associate the giant clouds show various chemical compositions which are at different elevations. Scientists think white, for example, are formed by ammonia crystals, and are at a temperature of 150 degrees Celsius.
No comments:
Post a Comment