Juno sends a first image of its visit to the moon Io

Dec. 30 () –

The JunoCam instrument aboard the Juno spacecraft captured this image of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io on December 14. from a distance of about 64,000 kilometers.

The photograph has been released by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) this November 29 in a mission status update.

The scientific data from the last flyby of Jupiter and this moon appear to be intact. Jupiter’s fifth moon, Io is the planet’s closest satellite and the most active volcanic body in our solar system.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft completed its 47th approach to Jupiter that day. Later, as the solar orbiter sent its science data to mission controllers from its onboard computer, the link was broken.

The problem -the impossibility of directly accessing the memory of the spacecraft that stores the scientific data collected during the flyby- was probably due to radiation peak when Juno flew through a zone of Jupiter’s magnetosphere with high radiation intensity. Controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and their partners successfully rebooted the computer and, on December 17, put the spacecraft in safe mode, a state of precaution in which only essential systems function.

ALL THE DATA NEXT WEEK

As of December 22, the efforts to recover the flyby data have yielded positive results, and the team is already downloading the scientific data. There is no indication that the scientific data obtained at the time of closest approach to Jupiter, or during the spacecraft’s flyby of Jupiter’s moon Io, have been adversely affected, reported the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on December 22.

The rest of the scientific data collected during the flyby is expected to be sent back to Earth over the next week, at which time its status will be verified. The ship is expected to exit safe mode within a week. Juno’s next flyby of Jupiter will take place on January 22, 2023.