Jupiter Bound Juno Performs its First Deep Space Maneuver

The Jupiter bound spacecraft has successfully fired its main engine Thursday at 6:57 p.m. EDT (3:57 p.m. PDT) . This first firing of Juno's main engine is one of two planned to process the spacecraft's trajectory, setting the stage for a gravity assist from a flyby of Earth on 9 October 2013.

NASA officials believe that the Juno spacecraft which is about 300 millions miles away from Earth fired its main engine for 29 minutes 39 seconds. And this burn is changing the spacecraft's velocity by about 770 mph while consuming about 829 pounds of fuel.

"This first and successful main engine burn is the payoff for a lot of hard work and planning by the operations team," said Juno Project Manager Rick Nybakken of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"We started detailed preparations for this maneuver earlier this year, and over the last five months we've been characterizing and configuring the spacecraft, primarily in the propulsion and thermal systems. Over the last two weeks, we have carried out planned events almost every day, including heating tanks, configuring subsystems, unlinking new sequences, turning off the instruments and increasing the spacecraft's spin rate. There is a lot that goes into a main engine burn."

Launched on 5 August 2011 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Juno will circle Jupiter 33 times from pole to pole and will use its collection of eight science instruments to explore the vague cloud cover.  With this mission the team intends to learn more about Jupiter's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core. The Juno mission is set to conclude in October 2017 when the probe will be de-orbited to crash into Jupiter.

"We still have the Earth flyby and another 1.4 billion miles and four years to go to get to Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. 

"The team will be busy during that whole time, collecting science on the way out to Jupiter and getting ready for our prime mission at Jupiter, which is focused on learning the history of how our solar system was formed. We need to go to Jupiter to learn our history because Jupiter is the largest of the planets, and it formed by grabbing most of the material left over from the sun's formation. Earth and the other planets are really made from the leftovers of the leftovers, so if we want to learn about the history of the elements that made Earth and life, we need to first understand what happened when Jupiter formed."