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When you’ve loved stunning photos of Jupiter in recent times, then the percentages are good that you just’ve seen photos taken by the JunoCam instrument on board the Juno spacecraft, at present in orbit round Jupiter. Sadly, this beloved science instrument has not too long ago developed some issues, inflicting the lack of photos collected throughout a latest flyby of the planet.
This illustration depicts NASA’s Juno spacecraft hovering over Jupiter’s south pole. NASA/JPL-Caltech
The issues started final 12 months when the spacecraft made its forty seventh flyby of Jupiter on December 14. Having accomplished the flyby, the spacecraft’s onboard laptop went to ship the info it had collected again to Earth, however the downlink was interrupted. There was an issue with the spacecraft accessing the info it had simply collected, in all probability brought on by the robust radiation it skilled on account of Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
Within the subsequent few days, the pc was rebooted and the spacecraft was put into secure mode to verify no additional harm occurred. Then the crew was capable of retrieve and downlink the info from the earlier flyby, and Juno returned to its regular operations on December 29.
Nonetheless, there was some corruption of the info collected on the forty seventh flyby — a couple of photos had artifacts like excessive ranges of noise. However the crew thought that this was solely a brief downside, brought on by excessive temperatures when the JunoCam digital camera was powered on after the break. In order that they went forward with planning for the forty eighth flyby, scheduled for January 22.
Sadly, there have been extra issues with the digital camera on the latest forty eighth flyby. “The JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft didn’t purchase all deliberate photos in the course of the orbiter’s most up-to-date flyby of Jupiter on Jan. 22,” NASA wrote in an replace. The problem was just like what occurred on the earlier flyby on account of a temperature rise within the digital camera.
“Nonetheless, on this new event the difficulty persevered for an extended time period (23 hours in comparison with 36 minutes in the course of the December shut go), leaving the primary 214 JunoCam photos deliberate for the flyby unusable,” NASA continued. “As with the earlier prevalence, as soon as the anomaly that triggered the temperature rise cleared, the digital camera returned to regular operation and the remaining 44 photos had been of excellent high quality and usable.”
Now, the query is what’s inflicting the rise in temperatures and whether or not it may be mounted. For now, the digital camera will stay powered on whereas groups work to research the issue.
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