Juno Armored Up to Go to Jupiter

NASA's Juno spacecraft will be forging ahead into a treacherous environment at Jupiter with more radiation than any other place NASA has ever sent a spacecraft, except the sun. In a specially filtered cleanroom in Denver, where Juno is being assembled, engineers recently added a unique protective shield around its sensitive electronics. New pictures of the assembly were released today.

"Juno is basically an armored tank going to Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator, based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Without its protective shield, or radiation vault, Juno's brain would get fried on the very first pass near Jupiter." An invisible force field filled with high-energy particles coming off from Jupiter and its moons surrounds the largest planet in our solar system.

This magnetic force field, similar to a less powerful one around Earth, shields Jupiter from charged particles flying off the sun. The electrons, protons and ions around Jupiter are energized by the planet's super-fast rotation, sped up to nearly the speed of light. Jupiter's radiation belts are shaped like a huge doughnut around the planet's equatorial region and extend out past the moon Europa, about 650,000 kilometers (400,000 miles) out from the top of Jupiter's clouds.

Mysterious Flash on Jupiter Left No Debris Cloud

A closer look at Jupiter reveals a faint imprint where the giant meteor touched its surface three days before. Image credits: NASA, ESA, M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), H.B. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.), A.A. Simon-Miller (Goddard Space Flight Center), and the Jupiter Impact Science Team.

Detailed observations made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found an answer to the flash of light seen June 3 on Jupiter. It came from a giant meteor burning up high above Jupiter’s cloud tops. The space visitor did not plunge deep enough into the atmosphere to explode and leave behind any telltale cloud of debris, as seen in previous Jupiter collisions.

Astronomers around the world knew that something must have hit the giant planet to unleash a flash of energy bright enough to be seen 400 million miles away. But they didn’t know how deeply it penetrated into the atmosphere. There have been ongoing searches for the “black-eye” pattern of a deep direct hit.

Rare Alignment of Triple Eclipses on Jupiter

There are Five spots – one colored white, one blue, and three black – are scattered across the upper half of the planet. Closer inspection by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals that these spots are actually a rare alignment of three of Jupiter's largest moons – Io, Ganymede, and Callisto – across the planet's face. In this image, the telltale signatures of this alignment are the shadows [the three black circles] cast by the moons.

Io's - Shadow is located just above center and to the left, it is the white circle in the center of the image.

Ganymede's - Located on the planet's left edge, it is the blue circle at upper right.

Callisto's - Present near the right edge. Callisto is out of the image and to the right.

Only two of the moons, however, are visible in this image. This image was taken with Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer.