NASA Spacecraft Sees Changes in Jupiter System

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft provided a new bird's-eye view of the dynamic Jupiter system as it traveled through the planet's orbit on Feb. 28.

New Horizons used Jupiter's gravity to boost its speed and shave three years off its trip to Pluto. Although the eighth spacecraft to visit Jupiter, New Horizons' combination of trajectory, timing and technology allowed it to explore details never before observed.

The spacecraft revealed lightning near the Jupiter's poles, the life cycle of fresh ammonia clouds, boulder-size clumps speeding through the planet's faint rings, the structure inside volcanic eruptions on its moon Io, and the path of charged particles traversing the previously unexplored length of the planet's long, magnetic tail.

"The Jupiter encounter was successful beyond our wildest dreams," says Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, NASA headquarters, Washington. "Not only did it prove our spacecraft and put it on course to reach Pluto in 2015, it was a chance for us to take
sophisticated instruments to places in the Jovian system where other spacecraft could not go. It returned important data that adds tremendously to our understanding of the solar system's largest planet and its moons, rings and atmosphere."

The New Horizons team presented its latest, most detailed analyses of those data Tuesday at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Orlando, Fla. Results also will appear in a special section of the Oct. 12 issue of the journal Science.

From January through June, New Horizons' seven science instruments made more than 700 separate observations of the Jovian system. Jupiter's weather was high on the list, as New Horizons' visible light, infrared and ultraviolet remote-sensing instruments probed the planet's atmosphere for data on cloud structure and composition.

Instruments saw clouds form from ammonia welling up from the lower atmosphere. Heat-induced lighting strikes in the polar regions also were observed. This was the first polar lighting ever seen beyond Earth, demonstrating that heat moves through water clouds at virtually all
latitudes across Jupiter.

New Horizons made the most-detailed size and speed measurements yet of "waves" that run the width of the planet and indicate violent storm activity below. Additionally, New Horizons snapped the first close-up images of the Little Red Spot, gathering new information on storm dynamics. The spot is a nascent storm about half the size of Jupiter's larger Great Red Spot, or about 70 percent of Earth's diameter.

The spacecraft captured the clearest images to date of the tenuous Jovian ring system, showing clumps of debris that may indicate a recent impact inside the rings or some more exotic phenomenon. Movies made from New Horizons images offer an unprecedented look at ring dynamics, showing the tiny inner moons Metis and Adrastea shepherding the materials around
the rings. A search for smaller moons inside the rings, and possible new sources of the dusty material, found no bodies wider than a mile.

The mission's investigations of Jupiter's four largest moons focused on Io, the closest to Jupiter, which has active volcanoes that blast tons of material into the Jovian magnetosphere and beyond. New Horizons spied 11 different volcanic plumes of varying size, three of which were seen for the first time. One, a spectacular 200-mile-high eruption rising above the
volcano Tvashtar, provided a unique opportunity to trace plume structure and motion. New Horizons' global map of Io's surface confirms the moon's status as the solar system's most active body, showing more than 20 geological changes since the Galileo Jupiter orbiter provided the last close-up look in 2001.

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NASA Spacecraft Gets Boost From Jupiter for Pluto Encounter

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully completed a flyby of Jupiter early this morning,using the massive planet's gravity to pick up speed for its 3-billion mile voyage to Pluto and the unexplored Kuiper Belt region beyond, NASA says.

"We're on our way to Pluto," says New Horizons Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md. "The swingby was a success; the spacecraft is on course and performed just as we expected."

New Horizons came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter at 12:43 a.m.EST, placing the spacecraft on target to reach the Pluto system in July 2015. During its closest approach, the spacecraft could not communicate with Earth, but gathered science data on the giant planet, its moons and atmosphere, NASA says.

At 11:55 a.m. EST mission operators at APL established contact through NASA's Deep Space Network and confirmed New Horizons' health and status, the space agency says.

The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons is gaining nearly 9,000 mph from Jupiter's gravity -- accelerating to more than 52,000 mph. The spacecraft has covered approximately 500 million miles since its launchin January 2006 and reached Jupiter faster than seven previous spacecraft to visit the solar system's largest planet. New Horizons raced through a target just 500 miles across, the equivalent of a skeet shooter in Washington hitting a target in Baltimore on the first try, NASA says.

New Horizons has been running through an intense six-month long systems check that will include more than 700 science observations of the Jupiter system by the end of June. More than half of those observations are taking place this week, including scans of Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere, measurements of its magnetic cocoon, surveys of its delicate rings, maps of the composition and topography of the large moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and a detailed look at volcanic activity on Io.

"We designed the entire Jupiter encounter to be a tough test for the mission team and our spacecraft, and we're passing the test," says New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "We're not only learning what we can expect from the spacecraft when we visit Pluto in eight years, we're already getting some stunning science results at Jupiter -- and there's more to come."

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