Juno, the massive solar-powered NASA spacecraft en route to Jupiter, has broken the distance record for solar-powered spacecraft—surpassing the Rosetta orbiter’s previous best by reaching the 493 million mile mark on Wednesday.
The spacecraft, which boasts a 30-foot-long array and more than 18,000 solar cells, is currently five times further way from the sun than Earth, according to Engadget. However, unlike Rosetta, the ESA probe that made history by traveling 492 million miles to orbit around a comet, Juno’s journey is far from over, as it is still more than 20 million miles away from Jupiter.
“Juno is all about pushing the edge of technology to help us learn about our origins,” principal investigator Scott Bolton from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said earlier this week in a statement. “We use every known technique to see through Jupiter’s clouds and reveal the secrets Jupiter holds of our solar system’s early history. It just seems right that the sun is helping us learn about the origin of Jupiter and the other planets that orbit it.”
“It is cool we got the record and that our dedicated team of engineers and scientists can chalk up another first in space exploration,” he added. “But the best is yet to come. We are achieving these records and venturing so far out for a reason – to better understand the biggest world in our solar system and thereby better understand where we came from.”
Spacecraft set to surpass the 500 million mile mark
Only eight spacecraft, all of which traveled using nuclear power, have ever made it more than 500 million miles from Earth. Juno is just the second solar-powered vehicle to ever make it past the asteroid belt, and as it moves closer to its July 4 rendezvous with Jupiter, it will be collecting just 1/25th as much energy from the sun has it did at the start of its journey, Gizmodo said.
Fortunately for NASA, Juno’s massive solar power arrays—which were nearly too big for the spacecraft to launch back in 2011—are extremely efficient at converting sunlight into energy. They have a 28-percent conversion rate, or enough to generate 500 watts of power after it reaches Jupiter. That’s not a ton of power, but it’s enough to keep it fully operational.
Once the spacecraft reaches its destination this summer, it will spend the next year orbiting the planet 33 times. Juno will come to within 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops every two weeks, the US space agency explained, during which time it will be studying the planet’s auroras to learn more about its origins, atmosphere, magnetosphere, and structure. Once it reaches its maximum distance from the sun, Juno will have traveled 517 million miles.
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Feature Image: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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