Jupiter-bound Juno’s Second Burn Delayed Due To First Burn Changes

NASA has postponed its Jupiter-bound spacecraft Juno's second round of critical engine firings by ten days in order to analyze pressure readings after a change in orbit took place during the first burn session.

A week after NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno successfully fired its first round of two critical engine firings which aims for a gravity sling shot past Earth, NASA has announced that the second firing has been delayed by 10 days and will now take place September 14.

The first firing took place at 6:57 p.m. EDT August 30 and was announced successful. The burn was said to be accurate and it changed the spacecraft's velocity by about 770 mph. The total duration of the burn lasted for approximately 30 minutes.

"This first and successful main engine burn is the payoff for a lot of hard work and planning by the operations team," Live Science quoted  Juno Project Manager Rick Nybakken of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif saying in a statement. He added, "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, uplinking new sequences, turning off the instruments and increasing the spacecraft's spin rate. There is a lot that goes into a main engine burn."

The second burn aims at achieving similar targets as the first and managers are positive about achieving them.

"We still have the Earth flyby and another 1.4 billion miles and four years to go to get to Jupiter," Space Flight Now quoted Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator saying. "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."

"Jupiter orbit insertion is almost like reverse thrust in a jet when it's landing. We're going very close to Jupiter. In fact, we're moving faster than any human-made object has ever moved at the time we do this. You basically turn the spacecraft so the engines are facing forward, you fire them and they slow you down, just like the reverse thrust of a jet, except it's a rocket engine. That slows us down enough so Jupiter's gravity field now grabs us and we're trapped in orbit around Jupiter."