By The Herald Editorial Board
Too quickly, if understandably, moved aside from the public’s attention by last week’s tragedies was the triumph of science and curiosity of a small space craft settling into orbit around the solar system’s largest planet.
But Juno, named for the Roman god Jupiter’s wife who was able to see past her husband’s cloak of dark clouds, will have more opportunities to capture the public’s imagination later this summer and throughout its mission to study Jupiter.
Juno’s arrival, after a five-year journey to the fifth planet from the sun, was itself a marvel of science and a grand achievement by NASA. Because of the massive amount of radiation generated by Jupiter, second only to the sun itself, the craft’s cameras and scientific equipment must be encased in a shielded vault. Even with that protection, NASA had to carefully plot an elliptical orbit that it will need to adjust periodically to avoid the most dangerous belts of radiation while getting into position for photos and other measurements.
To position Juno for a safe orbit, NASA had to program a 35-minute burn of its engine that would place it within a target area just a few miles wide. A few seconds of error, one way or the other, could have sent the probe hurtling into space or plunging into Jupiter itself. And this had to be done with a 48-minute gap in radio communications between Earth and Juno.
Magnified by the distance, failure is always an option. Recall that NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter in 1999 because one engineering team used metric units in its programming, while another used English units.
The $1.1 billion mission is expected to provide detailed information about Jupiter but also about the origins of our solar system and Earth, too.
With the ability to “peer” down through Jupiter clouds, scientists hope to learn whether the gas giant, mostly hydrogen and helium, has a rocky core or contains a globe of gases liquefied by immense pressure. The atmosphere’s water content also will be measured as will its magnetic rings, which produce auroras at both poles that themselves would dwarf the Earth.
“One of the primary goals of Juno is to learn the recipe of solar systems,” said Scott Bolton, the mission’s chief scientist during a news conference in June, for a Washington Post story. “Jupiter holds a very unique position in figuring out that recipe because it was the first to form.”
Jupiter, which formed after the sun coalesced from a cloud of gas and dust, swept up much of the hydrogen and helium that wasn’t claimed by the sun, but left heavier elements behind for the rocky planets, specifically Earth. Earth, in fact, may owe its existence to Jupiter’s role in the solar system’s creation.
Better yet, Juno may prompt more questions than it answers. NASA, in examining Juno’s photos of four of Jupiter’s moons during its earlier approach, found that the second-largest moon, Callisto, appeared dimmer than scientists expected, reflecting less light.
Juno represents a top achievement in NASA’s unmanned missions to the planets and out into the solar system. But it carries with it a small crew of aluminum Lego figures, one each of Juno and Jupiter, but also one of Galileo Galilei, who trained his telescope on Jupiter in 1610 and realized the four points of light near Jupiter were not stars but moons, an observation that led him to reject the conventional wisdom that everything in the universe revolved around the Earth.
From his perch aboard Juno, Galileo can again be present as some questions are answered and more mysteries are revealed.
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