NASA’s Juno Mission To Jupiter Breaks Record For Furthest Solar Powered Space Flight
NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter just broke the record for the furthest a solar powered spacecraft has ever gone. Nearing its primary target, the space probe has nearly completed its five-year journey to the biggest planet in our solar system.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft sped past the previous record milestone of 492 million miles (792 million kilometers) from the sun. The record for the furthest distance any space probe has gone while being powered solely by the sun was held by European Space Agency’s comet-chasing Rosetta mission, confirmed the agency. The orbit of Rosetta spacecraft peaked at 492 million miles in October, 2012. Incidentally, Rosetta wasn’t headed to Jupiter, but was sent to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Speaking about the achievement, Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said the following.
“Juno is all about pushing the edge of technology to help us learn about our origins. We use every known technique to see through Jupiter’s clouds and reveal the secrets Jupiter holds of our solar system’s early history. It just seems right that the sun is helping us learn about the origin of Jupiter and the other planets that orbit it.”
Launched way back in 2011, NASA’s Juno space probe was the first entirely solar powered spacecraft that was specifically designed to operate at such a great distance from the sun. No wonder it is the solar panels that are the most impressive feature of the spacecraft.
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The surface area of the solar panels needed to capture enough sunlight, even at such a great distance, to power the entire space probe is very high. Hence Juno, which weighs about four tons, features 30-foot-long (9-meter) solar panels. Collectively, the solar panels have 18,698 individual solar cells. If Juno had been orbiting the earth, its solar panels would be able to generate close to 14 kilowatts of electricity, which is more than enough for a few dozen smaller spacecraft. However, these solar panels have to supply power nearer to Jupiter, and that’s an entirely different ball game, said Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“Jupiter is five times farther from the sun than Earth, and the sunlight that reaches that far out packs 25 times less punch. While our massive solar arrays will be generating only 500 watts when we are at Jupiter, Juno is very efficiently designed, and it will be more than enough to get the job done.”
Juno’s flight is path breaking because no other spacecraft, in the last 30 years of space exploration, has made such an extraordinarily long journey while relying solely on solar power. All of the previous missions to Jupiter, eight in all, have relied on miniaturized nuclear reactors to achieve the speed and distance. However, in their defense, the prevalent solar panel technology back then was woefully inadequate to offer sustainable output, and the electronic components were power-hungry.
Juno, which is expected to arrive at Jupiter on July 4 of this year, is able to fly on solar power because of great improvements in solar-cell technology that is coupled with energy-efficient instrument cluster. Additionally, NASA engineers have ensured that Juno doesn’t venture into Jupiter’s shadow by tweaking the trajectory of the spacecraft. Moreover, Juno will be restricted to a polar orbit. Jupiter exerts a powerful magnetic field that traps radiation in a thick belt around the plane, reported Space. Juno’s trajectory is designed to minimize its exposure to radiation that can fry its sensitive electronics, reported Mission Juno.
[Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech]
