Posted by Heba El-Sayed
Monday, 06 February 2023 12:00 AM
If you have enjoyed viewing the beautiful pictures to Jupiter In recent years, chances are good you’ve seen images taken by the JunoCam instrument aboard the Juno spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around Jupiter.
Unfortunately, this scientific instrument has recently developed some problems, causing the loss of images collected during the last flyby of the planet.
The problems began last year when the spacecraft made its 47th flyby of Jupiter on Dec. 14.
After the flyby, the spacecraft’s onboard computer went to send the data it had collected back to Earth, but the downlink was cut off.
There was a problem with the spacecraft accessing the data it collected, possibly due to the strong radiation it was exposed to from Jupiter’s magnetosphere, Digitartlends reported.
For the next few days the computer was restarted and the spacecraft was put into safe mode to ensure no further damage was done.
The team was then able to retrieve the data from the previous flyby and correlate it down, and Juno returned to normal operations on December 29.
There were some problems with the data collected on the 47th flight – some of the images had traces such as high levels of noise.
But the team believed this was only a temporary problem, due to the high temperatures when the JunoCam was turned on. Planning for Flight 48, scheduled for January 22, went ahead.
But there were more problems with the camera on the recent Flight 48, NASA quoted in an update: “The JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft did not obtain all of the planned images during the orbiter’s final flyby of Jupiter on January 22.”
The problem was similar to what happened on the previous flight with the camera overheating.
“The problem persisted for a longer period of time (23 hours compared to 36 minutes during a close pass in December), and left the first 214 JunoCam images planned for the flyby unusable,” she added. It caused the temperature to rise, the camera went back to normal operation and the remaining 44 photos were of good quality and usable.”
According to the report, the camera will remain on while teams investigate the issue.
