NASA's Juno Spacecraft Enters Jupiter's Magnetic Field

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NASA's Juno Spacecraft Enters Jupiter's Magnetic Field
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
June 30, 2016

NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft has entered the planet's magnetosphere,
where the movement of particles in space is controlled by what's going
on inside Jupiter.

"We've just crossed the boundary into Jupiter's home turf," said Juno
Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute, San
Antonio. "We're closing in fast on the planet itself and already gaining
valuable data."

Juno is on course to swing into orbit around Jupiter on July 4. Science
instruments on board detected changes in the particles and fields around
the spacecraft as it passed from an environment dominated by the interplanetary
solar wind into Jupiter's magnetosphere. Data from Juno's Waves investigation,
presented as audio stream and color animation, indicate the spacecraft's
crossing of the bow shock just outside the magnetosphere on June 24 and
the transit into the lower density of the Jovian magnetosphere on July
25.

"The bow shock is analogous to a sonic boom," said William Kurth of the
University of Iowa in Iowa City, lead co-investigator for the Waves investigation.
"The solar wind blows past all the planets at a speed of about a million
miles per hour, and where it hits an obstacle, there's all this turbulence."

The obstacle is Jupiter's magnetosphere, which is the largest structure
in the solar system.

"If Jupiter's magnetosphere glowed in visible light, it would be twice
the size of the full moon as seen from Earth," Kurth said. And that's
the shorter dimension of the teardrop-shaped structure; the dimension
extending outward behind Jupiter has a length about five times the distance
between Earth and the sun.

Out in the solar wind a few days ago, Juno was speeding through an environment
that has about 16 particles per cubic inch (one per cubic centimeter).
Once it crossed into the magnetosphere, the density was about a hundredfold
less. The density is expected to climb again, inside the magnetosphere,
as the spacecraft gets closer to Jupiter itself. The motions of these
particles traveling under the control of Jupiter's magnetic field will
be one type of evidence Juno examines for clues about Jupiter's deep interior.

While this transition from the solar wind into the magnetosphere was predicted
to occur at some point in time, the structure of the boundary between
those two regions proved to be unexpectedly complex, with different instruments
reporting unusual signatures both before and after the nominal crossing.

"This unusual boundary structure will itself be the subject of scientific
investigation," said Barry Mauk of the Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, who is the instrument lead for the
Jupiter Energetic-Particle Detector Instrument (JEDI) on Juno.

The Juno spacecraft launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Juno
mission for Principal Investigator Bolton. Juno is part of NASA's New
Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed
Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech, in Pasadena,
manages JPL for NASA.

More information on the Juno mission is available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/juno

The public can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:

http://www.facebook.com/NASAJuno

http://www.twitter.com/NASAJuno

News Media Contact
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
david....@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077
dwayne....@nasa.gov / laura.l....@nasa.gov

2016-168