So I love space photography and these pictures of Jupiter from Juno's pass a couple days ago are the bomb-diggity. The team posts pictures here for people who want to see/process raw images and then upload the cool ones they've done.
Also I can't wait to see what science comes out of this. The Juno team already published that the magnetosphere they've measured is very different than what we expected Jupiter to have. It's very irregular and pretty strong. Nobody knows what that means about Jupiter internally yet, other than it's probably pretty weird!
They didn't manage to get into the orbit that they had originally planned for, which was designed for atmospheric/planetary science. The five gazillion review panels now required by NASA didn't seem to do much good, then. But anyway, the orbit that the spacecraft is stuck in now is much more suited for magnetosphere mapping, and I'm a magnetosphere guy, so I'm happy.
There is an abnormality with the thrusters. It may be nothing, but they can do all the work they want in the current orbit so they are not risking changing the orbit. I love that they dump the raw images on the internet and the astrophotography community is playing with the data almost in real time.
Yup. It turns out no one thought about vacuum degradation of the material used in the moving parts making up the thruster valves. And it was a five year trip to Jupiter in the hardest of hard vacuums.
That is indeed what happened. Lockheed made the spacecraft, but stern looks are pretty cool, don't let me keep you from giving some out. I take it you don't work on the pre-launch side of things, then. The QA and red tape have grown into a bureaucratic nightmare, and although Juno is only one example, I'd wager that the return on the investment into all the additional oversight is right around nothing. I'm so glad to be done with that phase of my project (MMS). Is this geeking out? Do we tag kleinbl00 yet?
Currently, I don't have time to put together any insight more thorough than what you could find by googling. I'll be looking at all that stuff in about a year or so from now, but until then, my singular focus is publishing my own papers. SoooOO0oOoO0o... did you ever sell your soul to a graduate school?What's your take on the findings so far with Jupiter?
Just do me a solid and be sure to tag me whenever y'all geek out.
Also if anyone has read the Algebraist then you'll understand why I want to fly straight into the storm ;)
We would also have accepted A Meeting With Medusa