"There's something about July 4—Independence Day in the US—and NASA missions. On July 4 of 1997, NASA's Mars Pathfinder spacecraft successfully landed on Mars, the first Mars lander since the twin Viking missions of 1976 (one of which was originally set to land on July 4 to celebrate the nation's bicentennial.) In the early morning hours of July 4, 2005 (still, admittedly, late July 3 on the West Coast), NASA's Deep Impact mission flew past comet Tempel 1. That spacecraft, living up to its name, fired a probe into the comet's nucleus, creating some celestial fireworks to ring in the nation's 229th birthday.
Juno is the latest NASA mission to celebrate the Fourth of July in a unique way. On the evening of July 4, Juno will fire its main thruster for 35 minutes, slowing the spacecraft down enough to enter into an initial orbit around Jupiter, making it only the second spacecraft, after Galileo, to orbit the solar system's largest planet. A second, shorter burn in October will put the spacecraft into its desired science orbit, a 14-day polar orbit.
Yet, with just a week before its arrival, Juno has not attracted the attention of many other missions. Last year at this time, the publicity machine was already in high gear for the upcoming Pluto flyby by New Horizons (which, like Juno, is a New Frontiers medium-class planetary science mission.) Juno, by comparison, has received far less attention. Of course, New Horizons was the first mission to Pluto, while Juno is only the latest in a series of missions to Jupiter dating back to the 1970s. Been there, done that? …"
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Amicalement
Armand
begins to write some fiction for the Wildcats campaign.
