It seemed the premature end of the mission. The Junocam, the camera that has given us the most spectacular images of Jupiter and his moons, was dying. The relentless radiation of the gaseous giant had degraded the sweat sensor Juno turning his photos into a noise knead and corrupt lines.
We had to try. With an overfruit of the moon ío just around the corner, the NASA team played the whole for the whole with a risky maneuver: cook the camera slowly at 600 million kilometers away to try to repair it.
Although all at the control center endured breathing, the play worked. And not only that, but the miraculous rescue has sat a precedent for future space missions.
Jupiter’s best photographer. Trying it was worth it because Junocam is not any camera. Is responsible for those Jupiter images that seem impressionist paintings and that, curiously, they are prosecuted by a community of fans on Earth.
But its location is priced: it is out of titanium “bunker” that protects the main electronics of the Juno probe. NASA engineers knew that their useful life would be limited in one of the most radioactive environments of the solar system.
The Calvary of the Junocam. The juno probe, that arrived in Jupiter in July 2016was designed to last until 2018, but its success has led NASA to extend the mission several times. During the first 34 orbits, Junocam worked perfectly.
From orbit 47, radiation ravages began to be evident. For orbit 56, in November 2023, the situation was critical. “Almost all the images were corrupt,” admits NASA In a statement.
The planet Jupiter and the moon ío photographed by Juno before and after repair
A repair to all or nothing. Diagnosing the failure of a component at millions of kilometers is a titanic task. Repairing is a miracle. The clues pointed to a damaged voltage regulator at the camera power supply. With few options, the team resorted to a process called annealing or Annealing.
The idea was, in essence, to heat the material and then cool it slowly, with the hope that heat would repair microscopic defects at the atomic level. “The annealing can sometimes alter a material such as silicon at the microscopic level, but we did not know if this would solve the damage,” explains Jacob Shaffner, chamber engineer.
Forged on fire. NASA sent a command to Juno so that the only heater in the Junocam raised its temperature at about 25 ° C, much more than usual. The result was a success … temporary. The camera sent sharp images for several orbits.
But Jupiter does not forgive. As the probe entered the radiation belts, the damage returned more strongly. “After orbit 55, our images were full of stripes and noise,” says Michael Ravine, head of the instrument. With an upcoming one Near Iro of íoonly one option was left. The only thing they had not tried was to take Junocam heater to the fullest and see if a more extreme recovery would save us.
The reward. The first week there were no improvements. The tension in the equipment was maximum. But just a few days after the encounter with ío, the images began to improve dramatically. By the time Juno went to just 1,500 kilometers of the most volcanic moon in the solar system, the camera worked almost as well as the day of its launch.
The success of the maneuver allowed Juno to capture very unprecedented and unprecedented images of the northern pole. The images revealed mountains covered with sulfur dioxide frost and Lava rivers that allowed scientists to rebuild geological formations as fascinating as A lava lake with a glass mountain Inside.
This achievement is the culmination of an extended mission that has led Juno to explore Jupiter’s great moons. First it was Ganímedes in 2021the largest satellite of the solar system, and then Europe in 2022. I was as follows on the list, and losing the main camera would have been a hard blow. The repair, of course, is not eternal. NASA informs that noise has begun to reappear in orbit 74. But the lesson learned is incalculable.
Images | NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SWRI/MSS
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