Originally posted at >>>/qresearch/23362725 (221529ZJUL25) Notable: NASA
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NASA Shares How to Save Camera 370-Million-Miles Away Near Jupiter
Jul 21, 2025
An experimental technique rescued a camera aboard the agency’s Juno spacecraft, offering lessons that will benefit other space systems that experience high radiation.
The mission team of NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft executed a deep-space move in December 2023 to repair its JunoCam imager to capture photos of the Jovian moon Io.
Results from the long-distance save were presented during a technical session on July 16 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Nuclear & Space Radiation Effects Conference in Nashville.
JunoCam is a color, visible-light camera. The optical unit for the camera is located outside a titanium-walled radiation vault, which protects sensitive electronic components for many of Juno’s engineering and science instruments.
This is a challenging location because Juno’s travels carry it through the most intense planetary radiation fields in the solar system.
While mission designers were confident JunoCam could operate through the first eight orbits of Jupiter, no one knew how long the instrument would last after that.
Throughout Juno’s first 34 orbits (its prime mission), JunoCam operated normally, returning images the team routinely incorporated into the mission’s science papers.
Then, during its 47th orbit, the imager began showing hints of radiation damage. By orbit 56, nearly all the images were corrupted.
Long Distance Microscopic Repair
While the team knew the issue may be tied to radiation, pinpointing what, specifically, was damaged within JunoCam was difficult from hundreds of millions of miles away.
Clues pointed to a damaged voltage regulator that is vital to JunPost too long. Click here to view the full text.
