Tuesday, 19. July 2016
Topic: Space - on July 19, 2016 at 4:16:00 PM CEST
How Do We Beam Pictures Back From Jupiter? It Takes A Village
Before Juno, the uncrewed spacecraft that NASA successfully inserted into orbit around Jupiter on July 4, there was Cassini, a similar multimillion-dollar amalgam of scaffolding, solar panels and scientific instruments that entered orbit around Saturn in 2004. Cassini’s success helped pave the way for Juno, but in 1992, a congressional budget cut nearly grounded that earlier mission before it even reached the launchpad. Tasked with the suddenly urgent job of making Cassini cheaper to build, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory took an ax to the bits that made the engineers nervous — the moving parts.
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