NASA's Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting Jupiter since July 2016, is about to leap over an eclipse - and thereby save the spacecraft's life.
since, and it has a few more of them left before it meets its planned demise in the storms of the vaporous maw in July 2021.
What Juno will see as it zooms toward Jupiter for its next close flyby while avoiding slipping into the gas giant's shadow. The sun can be seen just to the left of the planet, moving"up" with respect to the spacecraft during the evasive move.If it somehow survived this particular brand of oblivion, it would have probably just found itself in another.
This meant that the original trajectories of the spacecraft weren’t the ones it would end up taking. Ultimately, this led it to the scenario it’s currently faced with: potentially plunging into the largest shadow imaginable and perishing. “Pre-launch mission planning did not anticipate a lengthy eclipse that would plunge our solar-powered spacecraft into darkness,” said Ed Hirst, Juno project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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