Potential cost of increased storage onboard the spacecraft if it is significant data volume. Cost of downlinking the data to the ground, time on the DSN is expensive. I think the cost data sheets for DSN usage are online and it depends on data rate, what dish you are using, etc. but costs for usage are on the order of thousands per hour and data rates from Jupiter are pretty slow.
The cost of the camera itself is likely on the order of a couple hundred thousand. I've seen similar costs for small radiation hardened cameras and star trackers. The difference in parts cost for some things can be absolutely insane. Passive electrical components certainly cost more, but for active circuits it can be insane. A radiation hardened equivalent of a $20 FPGA can be something like $20,000.
All told, cost of integration and use over the mission is likely at least a few million. But on a $1.1 billion mission it still doesn't seem like a lot.
That’s why NASA is poor and pentagon is rich.
To me as a taxpayer, if there are no cool pictures, it doesn’t exist.
If they were politically shrewd, camera would be the biggest instrument.
And the next probe that will dive into the sun would carry the bullet that killed Kennedy or a shot off piece from Trump’s ear.
In college my son worked on the FFT engine that processed the radar data. He has code circling Jupiter!
He uses me as a reference.
As soon as they start being like “can he use the latest android libraries and techniques” or some crap. I just shoot back: “The man has code on another planet, he’s more than capable of picking up anything”
They shut up so fast lol
Congratulations, by the way. I’m being (trying to be) funny but I genuinely think that is cool and a reason to be proud.
Anybody with code circling Jupiter definitely has bragging rights and should be proud. If it were a just world, he/she wouldn't have to pay for a drink in a bar, ever.
You could imagine primitive aliens on the various moons each believing their own is the center of the Jupiter system, which is an elaborate world of epicycles. And when they communicate with the aliens of the other worlds (over shortwave radios each time the moons fly past each other), they debate Europacentrism and Ganymedocentrism and get into very heated arguments.
I guess we have grown used to this by now, but from the Moon landing pictures, to the Mars rovers and the various asteroid and planetary missions the objects of the Solar system are now vivid, complex and above all, "real" places.
[1]: https://www.astronomy.com/science/ask-astro-could-jupiter-ev...
On an exponential scale, Jupiter is closer to being a star than it is to being Earth. So... maybe you could say that Jupiter is almost a star. With such loose definitions talking about astronomical scales, there's a lot of room for interpretation and exaggeration.
I think the point is--in the spirit of appreciating Jupiter--Jupiter resembles the largest possible planets.
There are so preciously few places like Earth. How I wish more of us cared about it.
And life on earth is just an accident, and that intelligence and consciousness exists here for a very brief time on the universe's path to heath death doesn't matter at all. Except of us poor conscious beings who find joy in being alive and actually have the capacity to marvel, because it is marvellous that we can, and we should.
And I care that it is us who inhabits the earth, and not slugs.
Not sure a small star (e.g red-dwarf size) in Jupiter’s orbit would make much difference to Earth, other than it being brighter at night when it’s in the sky.
Jupiters sphere of influence is full of radiation, meaning the sat needs a lot of shielding which makes it very heavy. Additionally, you need a lot of thrust to not only get to Jupiter, but to be able to get into a geosync orbit around a planet other than earth, so youre gonna need a lot of fuel. And finally, time... Europa Clipper just left earth, it will be 8 years before it arrives at jupiter. The windows for launch are long but very spread out, so mission timing would be important too.
And, funfacts time.. Clipper is going to europa but will be spending much of its time in orbit around jupiter, passing closely to europa every orbit. This was done to limit the amount of radiation the sat will get during its mission, and that orbit is uuuge, in order to avoid as much of the radiation as possible.
The area of Jupiter and its moons is probably one of the most hostile space environments in our system, catching asteroids, radiation, huge planet full of gasses that would corrode you and your ship if you dipped in, and a huge gravity well that makes it difficult to leave again once youre there. Not many other planets in our system are as dangerous as jupiter and friends.
The SLS option would have entailed a direct trajectory to Jupiter taking less than three years. ... The move to Falcon Heavy saved an estimated US$2 billion in launch costs alone. NASA was not sure an SLS would be available for the mission since the Artemis program would use SLS rockets extensively, and the SLS's use of solid rocket boosters (SRBs) generates more vibrations in the payload than a launcher that does not use SRBs.
Fun side fact, solar flares and solar wind have to be taken into account during satellite orbit calculations. During one of the large flares earlier this year, the solar pressure pushed many satellites at least a few km off their orbits. Sats facing the sun lost altitude from the increased drag pressure
> The image is reprojected according to a preliminary geometrical camera model, cleaned from some of the camera artifacts, approximately illumination adjusted with a 3rd degree polynomial BRDF over the cosines of the incidence and emission angle
Check out the "Source Image(s)" link attached to each pic, it should give you a much better idea what the camera is actually seeing. Scroll to the bottom of the source image and you can see the different color channels as well as how it's interleaved for transmission. Here's the example I pulled that description from and it's source:
https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing?id=17025
https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing?id=JNCE_...
If the variation of color are indicative of a similar variation in density, why is there so much turbulence in Jupiter, why are the upper layers not more consistent? Tidal motion? Anyone know?
This[2] paper studies the ovals but has some details on the atmosphere, including the colors:
The reddish color is usually attributed to red “chromophores”, which are products of a series of complex chemical reactions, such as the UV photolization of ammonia with acetylene. These chromophores can act as coating material for the ammonia particles.
The cloud structure of the Jupiter's atmosphere, and in particular the nature of vortex features, as the [Great Red Spot] and the white ovals, is still puzzling.
This[3] paper tries to reproduce the reactions in the lab and compare them with the observed colors. It goes into some more details around the potential color formation.
I also want to just include this picture[4] because I just love the tiny fluffy clouds, which shadows provides amazing depth feeling.
[1]: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia25018-nasas-juno-mission-...
[2]: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201... Characterization of the white ovals on Jupiter's southern hemisphere using the first data by the Juno/JIRAM instrument
[3]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2016.03.008 Chromophores from photolyzed ammonia reacting with acetylene: Application to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (use the hub of science for full paper)
It is well intentioned, it makes the images much more informative, and they are just really cool, which helps with public support. But it is also a bit misleading and confuses people.
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/jupiter-in-true-and-false-...
https://www.cnet.com/science/space/why-nasas-image-of-jupite...
Of course, data is data so there is some science planned using it.
