The Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit only a second off schedule and within tens of miles of its target, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Essentially, NASA threaded the planetary equivalent of a needle 400 million miles away with a spacecraft traveling at 160,000 miles per hour.
“The more you know about the mission, you know just how tricky this was, and to have it be flawless, I just can’t put it into words,” said Guy Beutelschies, director of Interplanetary Missions at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, during a post-briefing Monday night. “To put a space craft into orbit around the most intense planet in our solar system, you’ve got to fire the main engine at exactly the right time, at exactly the right place. That’s not easy.”
That’s with a 48-minute delay between Earth and Juno. The mission to Jupiter will use microwaves and other instruments to peer behind the gas giant’s cloudy atmosphere to learn more about its chemical make-up and how it formed.
It may have taken five years, but the 900-member Juno team certainly made it look easy.
Experts say Juno’s nearly perfect maneuver into Jupiter’s orbit is a testament to NASA’s finely-tuned ability to traverse our solar system.
Less than perfect could mean disaster
“For launches and landings and orbit insertions, if something goes wrong, its all over,” said Emily Lakdawalla, senior editor for the Planetary Society, a Pasadena-based space exploration advocacy group. “The only way for things to go is either perfect or awful.”
NASA has turned space exploration into “an incredibly exact art,” she said.
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To be successful, NASA must predict the motion of other planets in our solar system accurately. The smallest details must also be factored in — for example, the miniscule amount of thrust created by heat radiating off the space craft.
Even light must be accounted for — rays of light create pressure when they strike space craft.
“It all starts with the kind of equations you learn in physics in high school,” Lakdawalla said.
NASA adapts when things go wrong
It’s the culmination of decades of triumphs and failures at NASA. Juno’s Project Manager Rick Nybakken triumphantly tore a contingency plan in half during the post briefing for Juno’s orbit insertion Monday. The plan outlined how they would respond if everything went wrong.
“So we prepared a contingency communications and procedure and guess what? We don’t need that anymore,” he said to cheers from the crowd. “It’s history.”
Nybakken said tearing the paper apart became an emotional release after discussing what to do in the event of failure for so long.
Part of NASA’s success comes from its ability to adapt and learn from problems when they do arise.
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The Juno team learned from the techniques used for the Voyager and Cassini spacecrafts, according to Nybakken.
“We’re really standing on the shoulders of giants,” he said.
Juno’s biggest hiccup came in 2013 as the space craft flew by Earth. The solar-powered Juno went into safe mode after passing into the Earth’s shadow and losing power, according to Nybakken. The spacecraft didn’t expect to lose so much power so quickly, so it switched to safe mode to protect itself.
The team used the experience to upgrade the spacecraft’s power model.
“We were never close to it being a significant issue and we learned a lot from it,” he said. “Nothing was damaged, it was easily recoverable.”
Why Juno protects itself
Juno has layers of safeguards to allow the craft to react before scientists and engineers on the ground ever learn a problem occurred. The team pre-plans for every possible failure they can think of.
But it’s impossible to predict everything.
While the team is monitoring Juno constantly now, they checked in only periodically with the Deep Space Network during the five-year trip to Jupiter. On one check-in, they found Juno had switched from one computer to the other after an error occurred. They debated switching back to the first computer, called Side A. Nybakken decided they needed to have no question about Juno’s health.
When they switched back, everything worked fine. Still, NASA developed six possible explanations for the initial switch and determined that all six — though they never found the culprit — did not compromise the mission.
“All of the those things, when they happened, they’re tremendous training exercises,” Nybakken said. “Afterwards you look back and you say, wow, the team really responded well and we learned a lot from that and none of those things were fatal.”
