Posted on 06/03/2005 1:32:21 PM PDT by Racehorse
A team led by the Southwest Research Institute has been selected to build and launch a $700 million NASA probe that will circle the giant planet and gather data about its swirling clouds, rock core, atmospheric gases, auroras and other features.
The mission, called Juno, will help scientists explain how matter gathered billions of years ago to form the planets in our solar system, said Scott Bolton, a scientist at the institute and the principal investigator for the mission.
[. . .]
The spacecraft is scheduled to launch by 2010 and will contain a payload of seven scientific instruments. Two of them will be built at the institute's campus in Southwest San Antonio. About $150 million of the project's budget will be spent here.
This is the third major space science contract in six months that scientists at the institute have landed with NASA.
[. . .]
Other partners in the Juno venture are the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which will manage the project, and Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, which will build the spacecraft.
[. . .]
Once launched, Juno will take five years to reach Jupiter, where it will settle into an orbit crossing both poles of the planet. It will spend a year collecting data and will try to follow up on questions left behind by the Galileo probe of 1995, a successful mission but one that didn't tell scientists all they wanted to know.
(Excerpt) Read more at mysanantonio.com ...
Any friends of yours involved with this?
Possibly. I will have to look at the flight team. However, at this stage, what I do (flight control room stuff) is still a ways off.
This mission was chosen over a mission to return samples from the moon's south pole.
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