WASHINGTON, October 9 (by Karin Zeitvogel for RIA Novosti) – NASA’s Juno spacecraft will fly within 347 miles (559 kilometers) of Earth Wednesday to get a slingshot-like power boost from the planet’s gravity that will hurl it into space at super speeds for the final leg of its journey to Jupiter.
The gravity boost will create enough propulsion to allow Juno to pull away from the sun and coast to Jupiter, which is between 391 million miles (629 million kilometers) and 577 million miles (928 million kilometers) away from Earth, depending on where the two planets are in their elliptical orbits.
To try to explain how the slingshot effect will boost Juno’s speed, a member of the team that is working on the Juno mission at the Southwestern Research Institute (SRI) in Texas likened the effect to “throwing a rock at an oblique angle against a moving train,” with both objects going in the same direction.
Thanks to the gravity-aided spike, Juno will eventually reach speeds exceeding 165,000 mph (250,000 kph) as it flies toward Jupiter, making it the fastest manmade object in space.
Once at Jupiter, where Juno is expected to arrive on July 4, 2016, the spacecraft will orbit the giant planet 33 times, taking around one Earth-year to complete the multiple pole-to-pole orbits and learn more about how the planet was formed.
As it approaches Earth Wednesday for the gravity assist, Juno will use an onboard camera to take “never-before-seen images of the Earth-Moon system, giving us a chance to see what we look like from Mars or Jupiter,” the principal investigator on the Juno mission at the SRI, Scott Bolton, said in a statement.
Astronauts on the International Space Station will make a first-ever attempt to film a deep space spacecraft approaching Earth, and amateur radio operators around the world have signed up to send a coordinated Morse code message to Juno as it speeds past Earth.
The fly-by will be visible from South Africa and will also be tracked by a telescope at an observatory in the Canary Islands and live-streamed at the link below, starting at 9:30 pm EDT (0130 GMT).
Juno was launched toward Jupiter on August 5, 2011, but without enough rocket power to get it there without a little help.
But that was intentional: NASA had a plan to have Earth provide a gravity assist to the 8,000 pound (3,267 kilogram) spacecraft that would increase Juno’s speed for the final leg of the journey to Jupiter.
The fly-by will happen without much input from NASA, where 97 percent of employees have been furloughed because of the US government shutdown.
Among the three percent of NASA workers who were exempted from the shut down and are still allowed to work are collision-avoidance experts for Juno, who will be monitoring the spacecraft as it speeds past Earth on Wednesday.
They’ll be watching for rocks and junk in space that might slam into Juno, not for a possible collision with Earth.
