The incredible rescue of the Juno probe instrument by NASA at millions of kilometers

NASA teams, notably JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), are known to manage the damage to the traveling probes and to reach, often in dantesque conditions, to save equipment to millions, even billions of kilometers. This is what they had to do with the Juno vessel, who left in 2011 and which has been orbiting Jupiter for nine years now. Admittedly, the case dates from 2023, but it has only been made public very recently.

It was the camera of the vessel that began to show signs of weaknesses in the 47th orbit, to the point of providing images completely corrupt in the 56th.

Jupiter’s magnetic field is 20 times more powerful than ours

Jupiter is the largest and massive planet of the solar system, about 300 times the mass of the earth, and its nucleus alone is 10. The magnetic field of the planet queen is proportional to the staggering quantities of matter loaded in motion in it, that is to say colossal.

The study of this magnetic field is also one of the main objectives of Juno. It was therefore necessary to protect the instruments of the ship, which was done mainly in two ways. The first consisted in ensuring that the juno orbits around Jupiter save him from being too close to the equator of the giant gaseous planet, where the radiation is the strongest. The second was use of titanium as a protective material.

Despite its very studied plunging orbit and physical protections, the imagery required an intervention without which the mission would have been partly compromised.

An out-of-service voltage regulator to repair 590 million kilometers away

If the teams suspected that possible problems would be linked to exceptional radiation around Jupiter, it was quite difficult to specifically point to the origin of the damage of the Junocam. The clues, however, converged in the direction of the power supply and a voltage regulator.

The work options, at this distance, being limited, the engineers turned to a technique called “receipt” (annealing), which consists of heating the material followed by a cooling period. “We knew that the receipt can sometimes alter a material such as silicon at a microscopic level, but we did not know if that would resolve the damage”explains Jacob Schfner, an imagery engineer of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, designer and developer of the Junocam, but also one of the scientists of the team that exploits the instrument.

Silicon was therefore heated to 77 degrees Fahrenheit (about 25 ° C) before cooling. The repair worked, but only a time, before the images become parasitized again.

The rest of the mission was to overflight Io, Jupiter’s moon which happens to be also the most volcanic star of the whole solar system. It was therefore tempted to light Juno’s heating until the overflight. The first weeks, the improvement was very disappointing and then, as if in a miracle, about 1,500 km from the IO surface, on December 23, 2023, the images received were almost as clear as at the time of Juno’s departure, 12 years earlier.

Today, the valiant probe is at its 74th orbit around Jupiter and its images are again very degraded, but it should be noted that the designers had ensured the operation of the instruments for only eight orbits. The contract is therefore more than completed.

“Juno teaches us to create and maintain tolerant spacecraft to radiation, providing information that will benefit satellites in orbit around the earth”summarizes Scott Bolton, principal researcher on Juno at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

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