Juno Gave NASA Controllers Quite the Scare During Recent Jupiter Flyby

For astir a decade, a ample probe has braved the harsh Jovian situation to bring america mesmerizing, close-up views of Jupiter and its moons. But sometimes, the state elephantine gets the champion of it. The Juno ngo precocious went into an unexpected harmless mode during a scheduled flyby of Jupiter, temporarily powering down its subject instruments.

Juno was making its 71st adjacent attack to Jupiter erstwhile it entered its precautionary presumption doubly connected April 4 arsenic it was flying by the state giant, NASA precocious revealed. It’s not wide precisely what whitethorn person caused Juno to spell into harmless mode, but the abstraction bureau believes it whitethorn person happened arsenic the spacecraft flew done Jupiter’s radiation belts.

Mission operations reestablished information transmission with Juno and the information indicated that the spacecraft archetypal went into harmless mode astatine 5:17 a.m. ET, which was astir an hr up of its scheduled flyby. Juno entered harmless mode again astir 45 minutes aft perijove, oregon its adjacent attack to Jupiter. During harmless mode, nonessential functions connected the spacecraft are suspended. Juno powered down its subject instruments portion keeping its connection and powerfulness absorption systems on. The spacecraft rebooted its computer, and pointed its antennas toward Earth for communication.

Safe mode is activated erstwhile the spacecraft detects an anomaly. Although the squad is inactive waiting to analyse the information to fig retired precisely what went wrong, aboriginal indications suggests that Juno was flying done Jupiter’s radiation belts erstwhile its harmless mode was activated.

Jupiter’s magnetic tract is 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s and the strongest of each the planets successful the star system. The planet’s magnetosphere traps charged particles and past speeds them up similar a particle accelerator, according to the European Space Agency. The highest fluxes of energetic particles are recovered successful the doughnut-shaped belts astir Jupiter’s equator, its radiation belts.

Juno boasts a titanium radiation vault to artifact high-energy particles from impacting the spacecraft, but that’s sometimes not enough. The spacecraft went into harmless mode 4 times since arriving astatine Jupiter successful 2016.

After reestablishing connection with Juno, the squad is moving to transmit the information collected earlier and aft it entered harmless mode arsenic the spacecraft conducts formation bundle diagnostics, according to NASA.

Juno is scheduled for an upcoming flyby of Jupiter connected May 7, during which it is acceptable to transportation retired a adjacent attack of the Jovian satellite Io at a region of astir 55,300 miles (89,000 kilometers). Hopefully the spacecraft manages to support its subject instruments turned connected this time.