Heating problems and file loss, it seems, don’t just affect Earthlings. That’s because a camera on the Juno space probe, which has been flying over Jupiter since 2016, lost a series of photographs in its most recent round, on January 22, and only managed to capture regarding a fifth of the planned material.
The probe, which is approaching its 50th flyby of the solar system’s largest planet and its moons, already faced a similar conflict in December. The team responsible for the mission believes that the camera failure stems from the camera reaching an abnormally high temperature and is still looking for a solution to the problem.
After the flyby in December, the probe had a memory problem that put the spacecraft in safe mode, delaying the transmission of data to Earth. In the end, Juno recovered smoothly and most of the data reached Earth safely, but its camera had problems early in the journey.
The camera was directed to capture 90 images during the December flyby, but the first four photos turned out poorly. The mission team saw that when the JunoCam was turned on, temperatures rose enough to interfere with photography and the instrument had cooled down by the end of the first four images.
The problem appears to have recurred, but for a longer period — a total of 23 hours instead of 36 minutes, according to NASA, which left 214 unusable images, yielding only 44 good records.
“The mission team is evaluating the JunoCam engineering data acquired during the two recent flybys – the 47th and 48th of the mission – and is investigating the root cause of the anomaly and mitigation strategies. JunoCam will remain powered on for the time being and the camera continues to operate in its nominal state.”
The probe’s next flyby is scheduled for March 1. It’s worth remembering that the JunoCam wasn’t guaranteed to last that long, and was designed to survive only seven passes through the dangerous environment around Jupiter. The probe’s own main mission is already running beyond schedule — it was until July 2021, but it should work overtime until September 2025.
