Eclipse Avoiding “Shadow Jump” — By Juno, At Jupiter… Completed.

This is excellent “off-planet” news, at mighty Lord Jupiter. Twisty lil’ Juno just made a flawless long jump, to avoid getting stuck in the blackness of a 12 hour solar eclipse, behind Jupiter’s shadow, in early November.

That shadow, since Juno is solar powered, would have killed all her copper-colored back-up battery pack’s power. But with unwasted grace, she has lithely twisted away from that eventuality, per NASA and JPL, as of the end of last week:

. . . .NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter successfully executed a 10.5-hour propulsive maneuver — extraordinarily long by mission standards. The goal of the burn, as it’s known, will keep the solar-powered spacecraft out of what would have been a mission-ending shadow cast by Jupiter on the spacecraft during its next close flyby of the planet on Nov. 3, 2019.

Juno began the maneuver yesterday, on Sept. 30, at 7:46 p.m. EDT (4:46 p.m. PDT) and completed it early on Oct. 1. Using the spacecraft’s reaction-control thrusters, the propulsive maneuver lasted five times longer than any previous use of that system. It changed Juno’s orbital velocity by 126 mph (203 kph) and consumed about 160 pounds (73 kilograms) of fuel. Without this maneuver, Juno would have spent 12 hours in transit across Jupiter’s shadow — more than enough time to drain the spacecraft’s batteries. Without power, and with spacecraft temperatures plummeting, Juno would likely succumb to the cold and be unable to awaken upon exit.

“With the success of this burn, we are on track to jump the shadow on Nov. 3,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Jumping over the shadow was an amazingly creative solution to what seemed like a fatal geometry. Eclipses are generally not friends of solar-powered spacecraft. Now instead of worrying about freezing to death, I am looking forward to the next science discovery that Jupiter has in store for Juno. . . .”

Onward. . . into Sweet Will’s version of “the unknown country” — but the no longer. . . dark unknown country. Grin.

नमस्ते