Officials at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California announce that the Juno spacecraft has just completed a new course-correction maneuver. This will place it on a more efficient trajectory towards Jupiter, its final destination. The maneuver began at 10:10 am PST (1810 GMT) on February 1, and lasted for about 25 minutes. This allowed the probe to accelerate by an additional 3.9 feet (1.2 meters) per second, but cost it about 6.9 pounds (3.11 kilograms) of fuel.
“We had a maneuver planned soon after launch but our Atlas V rocket gave us such a good ride we didn't need to make any trajectory changes,”
JPL Juno project manager Rick Nybakken explains.
The probe was launched on August 5, 2011, and is scheduled to spend a total of about five years on its route to Jupiter. At this point, it's located about 279 million miles (449 million kilometers) away from Earth.
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