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NASA's Juno spacecraft has completed its first of 36 close flybys of Jupiter:
NASA's Juno mission successfully executed its first of 36 orbital flybys of Jupiter today. The time of closest approach with the gas-giant world was 6:44 a.m. PDT (9:44 a.m. EDT, 13:44 UTC) when Juno passed about 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) above Jupiter's swirling clouds. At the time, Juno was traveling at 130,000 mph (208,000 kilometers per hour) with respect to the planet. This flyby was the closest Juno will get to Jupiter during its prime mission. "Early post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders," said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
There are 35 more close flybys of Jupiter planned during Juno's mission (scheduled to end in February 2018). The August 27 flyby was the first time Juno had its entire suite of science instruments activated and looking at the giant planet as the spacecraft zoomed past. [...] While results from the spacecraft's suite of instruments will be released down the road, a handful of images from Juno's visible light imager -- JunoCam -- are expected to be released the next couple of weeks. Those images will include the highest-resolution views of the Jovian atmosphere and the first glimpse of Jupiter's north and south poles.
The image at the top of the NASA article and being displayed by other news organizations was taken from around 703,000 kilometers away. The imagery from 4,200 kilometers away should be a lot more interesting.
At closest approach, Juno's speed was so fast that one lap of the earth at the equator would take about 12 minutes, and one lap of Jupiter would require the better part of 4 hours.
(Score: 4, Informative) by martyb on Monday August 29 2016, @03:21PM
AndyTheAbsurd wrote:
I have found NASA's Deep Space Network - Now [nasa.gov] site (javascript required) to be very informative as to what probes NASA is currently in contact with, the data rate, the distance to it, as well as which radio dish(es) are in contact with which probe. If they would only add a link to each probe's web site, it would be a great one-stop source for what is going on in space right now!
The Planetary Society is active in the topic of planetary exploration and I have found Emily Lakdawalla's blog to be am especially great resource: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/ [planetary.org]. Very readable, has tech details if you want, but also presents enough information at a high enough level of presentation to make things palatable for the non-professional enthusiast.
Also, I agree that looking at the entirety of ScienceDaily is like drinking from a firehose... I find it helpful to restrict it to looking at only a subset of the posted articles using this link: https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/space_time/ [sciencedaily.com] for just space-related news.
Another interesting site I've found is http://spaceflightnow.com/ [spaceflightnow.com] which primarily provides notice of rocket launches but also has some reports from the missions, as well. If you are looking just for the upcoming launch schedule, they have a page dedicated to that: http://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/ [spaceflightnow.com] where I just noticed that SpaceX has scheduled another launch:
Hope that helps!
Wit is intellect, dancing.