Congrats to the Juno team!
I can't wait to see the pictures, and watch out for the Monolith!
It was a hats-in-the-air weekend at NASA, with the agency announcing its Juno probe's first close-up Jupiter fly-by was a success. The probe has now started the agonisingly slow process of downloading the data collected on its Sunday swoop (closest approach was 13:44 UTC, August 28; adjust as your local timezone dictates). …
Just as a side note, isn't "train" a wonderful word? It can mean:
- to point something
- to practice
- a thingy on wheels that gets pulled
I'm pretty sure I haven't found half the different meanings yet (no mind to check up on wiktionary or so). Just thought it all rather enjoyable.
Some of that information is here
At 208,000 km/h, how does the camera get a non-blurred image?
Space probes and satellites have used three techniques to compensate for motion:
1) Rotate the spacecraft (e.g., New Horizons, Pioneers 10 & 11)
2) Rotate a scan platform (e.g., Voyagers' scan platform)
3) Rotate part of the camera (e.g., Lunar Orbiters and KH-7s shifted their film during exposure; KH-8s had a steering mirror)
Which is pretty fast.
As for download speed....
I keep thinking some of those Mars orbiters are geared up to do data relay from ground probes.
Now they'd only be available when one of them had LOS with Juno and the clocks would have to be really tightly synched but in principal you could (if the hardware allows it) have it switched to some kind of high data rate in bursts, raising the average data rate, possibly quite a lot.