Monday was Juno's first flyby since a plan to tighten orbits from 53.5 days to two weeks had to be scrapped.
NASA's Juno spacecraft sailed over Jupiter's cloud tops early Monday, the fourth time the solar-powered probe has approached the giant planet and collected science data since its arrival last July 4.
[...] On its current trajectory, Juno arcs out to a distance several million miles from Jupiter and returns for a high-speed encounter once every 53-and-a-half days.
[...] "Every time we get near Jupiter's cloud tops, we learn new insights that help us understand this amazing giant planet," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
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Juno's Fourth Science Flyby of Jupiter
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by aristarchus on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:52AM
Actually, for the casual Jupiter fan, the failure to go into a tight orbit may be a boon. If Juno had gone in close, the Juno-cam, visual range camera would have been fried by the planet's prodigious radiation. So we owe the neat new pics to the failure of navigational equipment? Of course, on the down side, the actual science has be much impeded.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:09PM (1 child)
Editors, please fix story: Jupiter is not a planet because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:10PM
Yo dawg, I put a miniature solar system inside your solar system... But when I try to light it for you (Shoemaker-Levy), it didn't work, sorry.