If you ’re a fan of NASA ’s Juno spacecraft and itsrather wonderful imagesof Jupiter , then we ’ve get some good news for you . Because it looks like the mission will be exsert for another few years .
Juno has been in orbit around Jupiter since 2016 , spending the last two year make more than a XII daring dive over the Pole of the gas heavyweight . In so doing it has returned stunning images andvast amounts of dataabout Jupiter .
When the mission was first designed , NASA had planned to localise Juno on a 14 - day orbit of Jupiter , having it conduct 37 range up to February 2018 before being purposefully destruct in the air of the planet . A valve issue , however , has kept it stuck in a wider 53 - mean solar day compass , pushing the mission out to July 2018 .
Now it looks like NASA has decided to widen the delegacy even further . fit in to Dave Mosher writing forBusiness Insider , source have revealed the $ 1 billion deputation will continue until July 2021 , with scientific workplace continuing until September 2022 . NASA , for its part , has alreadyplanned out the orbitsfor such an filename extension .
“ The Juno mission leaders received a memo authorizing the extension in mid - May , but NASA has not yet publicly announced its decision , ” Mosher wrote , cite an unnamed reference .
One of the master goals for the mission is to map the integrality of Jupiter . To do so demand a totality of 32 close passes , know as perijove . But the valve issue meant that only 14 of 32 could be completed by July 2018 . This extension will leave for all 32 to be complete .
And there ’s even a prospect the delegation could continue for longer than that . Scott Bolton , the principal detective on NASA ’s Juno military mission , previously told IFLScience that the team had not ruled out changing the orbit for an extensionbeyond 2022 , perhaps to enquire objects of interest like Europa .
In the original mission excogitation , it ’s thought Juno ’s law of proximity to the major planet would make the spacecraft issues , as the radiation from Jupiter is vivid and damaging . Staying in this wider orbit however , the spacecraft spend more time outside Jupiter ’s harshest radiation , and thus may survive for long than expected .
When the mission does finally descend to an end , Juno will be purposefully slam dance into the atmosphere of Jupiter , where it will be destroyed . This same destiny bechance other probes , likeCassini at SaturnandGalileo at Jupiter , to prevent them hitting one of the potentially life - harboring moons like Enceladus or Europa .
For Juno , though , it attend like that destruction dive just have a little bit further away . We have enquire NASA to substantiate the extension , but have yet to meet a comment.(Update , it ’s now beenconfirmed by NASA )
