During the science mission, it will only get moderately high-resolution photos of Jupiter within a two-day period around each perijove. Juno's orbit is highly elliptical, so it spends almost all of its time much farther than a million kilometers from Jupiter.Jupiter arrival is also called Perijove 0. JunoCam and all the science instruments will be turned off from 5 days before Jupiter arrival until 2 days after Jupiter arrival. No high-resolution Jupiter photos will be taken during Jupiter orbit insertion on July 5.(As a general rule of thumb, divide 210 by the range to Jupiter in millions of kilometers and you'll get Jupiter's apparent diameter to JunoCam, in pixels.) It can achieve higher resolution than most amateur astrophotos only when it is within roughly a million kilometers of the planet. JunoCam's wide field of view means that most of the time, its photos of Jupiter will be quite small.During the science mission (which begins on November 9), Juno will acquire data less frequently: 5 to 20 images on each 14-day orbit, mostly around perijove. During approach and early orbits, JunoCam will take hundreds of sequential image frames that can be assembled into three different movies: the "Approach Movie", the "Marble Movie", and the "One-Orbit Movie." More details on these movies below. Plans could change due to a variety of unforeseen circumstances. Everything described in this post is planned imaging.For the gory details, you can read this open-access paper describing it. To get super technical, it's a pushframe camera that uses time-delay integration to build up adequate signal despite the low light levels and rapidly rotating spacecraft. To take images, JunoCam uses the rotation of the spacecraft to sweep its view along, building up image swaths. It can take images in RGB color or through an infrared filter sensitive to the presence of methane, which will highlight Jupiter cloud features. It's mounted to the side of Juno, which continuously spins at 2 rotations per minute. Its wide (58-degree) field of view is selected to allow it to take in all of Jupiter's globe when Juno is flying close over the Jovian poles at about an hour before and an hour after its closest approach on every science orbit. Its camera head looks very similar to Curiosity's MARDI, but JunoCam is much heavier because it has additional shielding to protect it from Jupiter's radiation environment. JunoCam is a very small instrument its electronics are based on the small boxes developed for Curiosity's science cameras. The head of the JunoCam team is Candy Hansen, of the Planetary Science Institute. Thus NASA procured JunoCam from Malin Space Science Systems for public outreach purposes. But everyone recognized that it would be a crime to send a spacecraft to Jupiter and not include a camera. Want to know what to expect from JunoCam, when, and where to find it? This post is for you.Ī brief JunoCam primer: The Juno spacecraft did not need a camera to accomplish its science goals. We won't be able to see spectacular views of Jupiter's belts and zones from Jupiter orbit until the very end of August, and it'll be November before we'll see automated release of high-resolution raw images. Juno will go in to orbit at Jupiter on July 5 (July 4 in North and South American time zones), and it's carrying a camera that's going to take really awesome photos of Jupiter.
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