Jupiter-bound space probe captures Earth and Moon

Great thread thanks...it would be great to have a montage of thisscene at ever increasing intervals of distance say evey 100,000miles since the probe left Earth?

OK so some above posts got me to thinking, JUNO is just 32.2 light seconds away. It didn't leave earth and head straight out to Jupiter, it's on a sort of orbital trajectory and will head back for a gravity assist boost before it heads to Jupiter, and pick up speed. It's 6 million miles away from earth but really hasn't traveled that far, because it's traveling the same basic direction as the earth, and the earth is traveling faster than JUNO is, so earth is more responsible for creating the distance JUNO is from earth.

Here's a nice video illustrating the JUNO flight path, as you can see it travels much further that the distance to Jupiter.



Juno will cover 2.8 billion kilometers (nearly 1.8 billion miles) during its long, looping voyage. That's 19 times farther than the distance between Earth and the Sun, and 15 times farther than the closest distance between Earth and Jupiter.

(This was all available on a JUNO post I made August 5th, but due to the post not having conspiracy speculations, it was largely ignored here, it was just mission information, boring stuff).

This video here will help explain why JUNO will head back for an earth gravity assist boost in two years.

Incidentally, JUNO will become the fastest manmade spacecraft ever flown.

Jupiter's gravity pulls in Juno faster and faster until the spacecraft reaches a speed over 250,000 kilometers per hour (150,000 miles per hour) — making it the fastest human-made object ever. When it arrives at Jupiter, it slams on the brakes, firing its main engine in reverse. After slowing down, Juno can then enter Jupiter's orbit.

I haven't looked into yet how JUNO escaped earth orbit. It took a speed of about 24,500 mph for the Apollo spacecrafts to reach earth escape velocity, and it took them 3 days to reach the moon. The earth is traveling about 66,600 mph around the sun, and covers about 587 million miles a year on its orbit around the sun.

JUNO is going to be drawn to a speed of about 150,000 mph approaching Jupiter, and Jupiter is only traveling at a speed around the sun of about 29,200 mph, so JUNO is going to have to have a lot of power to slow down enough to attain orbit around Jupiter, which will start as a highly elliptical orbit and eventually close in closer to the planet's atmosphere. Lots of maneuvers in orbit will have to take place, I believe using some of the moons of Jupiter for gravity assist as well as its solar power. JUNO is going to be the furthest operating space probe powered by solar panels.

One amazing fact I found is the 2013 earth flyby, JUNO will be within 300 miles to get its final boost, now that's some flying if you ask me.

Originally posted by timewalker
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." ~ Carl Sagan

Minus the sunbeam.

I found this quite humbling indeed. We are infinitesimal on the scale of things.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/727acd3be478.jpg[/atsimg]

This image of Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) was taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft on Aug. 26, 2011, when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. It was taken by the spacecraft's onboard camera, JunoCam. The solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Aug. 5 to begin a five-year journey to Jupiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Juno covered the distance from Earth to the moon (about 250,000 miles or 402,000 kilometers) in less than one day's time. It will take the spacecraft another five years and 1,740 million miles (2,800 million kilometers) to complete the journey to Jupiter. The spacecraft will orbit the planet's poles 33 times and use its eight science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant's obscuring cloud cover to learn more about its origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.

The solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 9:25 a.m. PDT (12:25 p.m. EDT) on Aug. 5 to begin its five-year journey to Jupiter.

Source

edit on 31-8-2011 by timewalker because: (no reason given)

And god created the heaven and the earth

Can't help it, but... "That's no moon! It's a space station!"

No seriously, these kind of images indeed make us feel humble. And to imagine that so many people (what is is now? almost 7 billion?) live on that tiny, tiny piece of floating rock! Inspiring!

reply to post by timewalker


As big as the earth and moon are, its still not enough for humanity! I hope we can start pillaging the resources of other planets soon.

reply to post by Vandalour

Originally posted by Vandalour
reply to post by timewalker

 

I wonder why there is no stars visible in that foto ?

like stars are shown in this foto

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/9766d2daee32.jpg[/atsimg]

Because the photo is a zoom-in (I believe) therefore the stars in the background would become more apart as you zoom in.

Originally posted by Illustronic
.

Jupiter's gravity pulls in Juno faster and faster until the spacecraft reaches a speed over 250,000 kilometers per hour (150,000 miles per hour) — making it the fastest human-made object ever. When it arrives at Jupiter, it slams on the brakes, firing its main engine in reverse. After slowing down, Juno can then enter Jupiter's orbit.

Nice post.
Can you explain how the brakes work to slow the the craft from such enormous
speeds. What does the engine have to push against, in the vacuum of space?

reply to post by timewalker


I saw that this morning checking in with space weather. Article should be titled, "Much Ado About Nothing"

Originally posted by pshea38

Originally posted by Illustronic
.

Jupiter's gravity pulls in Juno faster and faster until the spacecraft reaches a speed over 250,000 kilometers per hour (150,000 miles per hour) — making it the fastest human-made object ever. When it arrives at Jupiter, it slams on the brakes, firing its main engine in reverse. After slowing down, Juno can then enter Jupiter's orbit.

Nice post.
Can you explain how the brakes work to slow the the craft from such enormous
speeds. What does the engine have to push against, in the vacuum of space?

It doesn't have to "push against" anything. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; the gas that leaves a spacecraft thruster pushes the craft in the opposite direction simply thanks to Newtonian physics. The gas itself does not need anything in space to "push against."

reply to post by pshea38


Juno uses a bipropellant Leros-1b main engine that uses hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide for propulsion and provides a thrust of 645 newtons. It is fixed to the spacecraft body and is used for major burns. The engine bell is enclosed in a debris shield.

Juno utilizes a monopropellant reaction control system (RCS) consisting of twelve jets that are mounted on four rocket engine modules. These thrusters are used for control of the vehicle’s orientation and to perform trajectory correction maneuvers.

And yes, as explained above, equal and opposite reaction, which explains if you were curious, that if you were unprotected floating in space and fart, it would propel you ever so slightly in the opposite direction said fart was directed. But you would have greater gaseous releases if exposed to the vacuum of space I believe would be more forceful than said fart, but that's a whole other topic.

Originally posted by Illustronic
I haven't looked into yet how JUNO escaped earth orbit. It took a speed of about 24,500 mph for the Apollo spacecrafts to reach earth escape velocity, and it took them 3 days to reach the moon.

It was boosted out of earth orbit by a Centaur upper stage. In less than 12 hours both Juno and its spent Centaur stage managed to travel about 2/3rds the way to the moon, yet I was still able to track them by regressing the pre-launch trajectory in order to account for the launch delay. Sure enough, there they were, leaving our earth-moon system.

First I looked up at Juno, and now Juno looks back, how cool.

reply to post by mnmcandiez
I think you might have misunderstood. Importance had nothing to do with it.

To the Mind, no big thing.
To the body, space is really really big.

This image of Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right)

Glad, they cleared that up

reply to post by ngchunter


Fascinating! Super work. But do you have any idea what speed JUNO reached from the Centaur upper stage boost? I WAS in the understanding that is was supposed to be about 24,000 mph, but I read it is going less than 10,000 mph and I do understand that relative to the earth that is over 20,000 mph and I'm left a bit confused. I understand a bit about gravity assist thrusts and speed isn't constant during those maneuvers, but will 'coast' toward Jupiter after that assist.

I think I read that the New Horizons spacecraft (to Pluto) left earth obit faster than any other space probe, and after a boost from Jupiter should reach a speed of something like 51,000 mph but will reach Pluto at about 31,000 mph. Now realize I'm siting these velocities from memory so I could be way off since I'm not looking up all of the data right now.

1 day - 238857 miles = 9952.375
27 days since launch 6m miles = 9959.259

Thats a discrepancy of 693.115740741 mph

I wonder if brain farts would be a propellant? 6.884 mph

reply to post by Illustronic

Me hiring people smarter than me proves Im smarter than them.

I love it. Carry on smart guy's.

Originally posted by Illustronic
Fascinating! Super work. But do you have any idea what speed JUNO reached from the Centaur upper stage boost?

I'd have to do some more digging, perhaps sim it myself, to see what the speed was at Centaur booster cutoff, but I can tell you that according to JPL's post-launch data, at the moment of Juno separation minutes later it was traveling at 11.56757 km/sec, which is 25,875.9 mph

reply to post by ngchunter


Sounds right.

People should really visit this great interactive JUNO site. It is believed that Jupiter was the first planet to form after the sun, and finding out more about Jupiter will help us find out more about our very origins.

Mission JUNO
Turn your volume up.