14 DAY TRIAL // On Thursday, May 5, the NASA Administrator visited the Titusville, Florida-based Astrotech payload processing facility, which currently holds the Juno spacecraft. The mission is being developed by NASA to visit Jupiter, and provide new data about the gas giant.
Charles Bolden visited the installation with the express purpose of seeing the robotic explorer, and being briefed on its progress. He met with engineers and mission experts, and even got in the clean room where Juno is being assembled.
The top NASA official is a supporter of this mission, even if the spacecraft is scheduled to fly only 33 orbits over the Jovian poles. Regardless, NASA is convinced that this is all the time scientists need to extract some valuable information about the planet.
The things that experts are most interested in include the origins and inner structure of the celestial body, as well as finding out more about its atmosphere and magnetosphere. A more complex mission, similar to the Cassini orbiter around Saturn, would have looked at the Jovian rings and moons too.
The space probe was delivered to Florida in early April, by engineers at the Denver, Colorado-based Lockheed Martin Space System, which is the main contractor NASA selected for this mission.
“The Juno spacecraft and the team have come a long way since this project was first conceived in 2003,” explained at the time the principal investigator on the new mission, expert Scott Bolton.
“We're only a few months away from a mission of discovery that could very well rewrite the books on not only how Jupiter was born, but how our solar system came into being,” he went on to say.
Bolton holds an appointment as a research scientist at the San Antonio, Texas-based Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). The mission is managed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California.
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech), also in Pasadena, is managing JPL for the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD), at the space agency's Headquarters in Washington, DC.
Also involved in constructing Juno is the Italian Space Agency (ISA), headquartered in Rome. Its experts built the infrared spectrometer instrument on the space probe, as well as a portion of the radio science experiment equipment onboard.
The spacecraft is currently scheduled to launch sometime between August 5 to August 26. It will lift off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), in Florida, aboard an Atlas V delivery system developed by United Launch Alliance.
ULA is a cooperative endeavor between Lockheed Martin and the Boeing Company.