Timeline of Juno Jupiter Orbit Insertion events
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla
2016/06/16 19:55 UTC

Topics: mission status, Juno

Today NASA held a press briefing and released a press kit for the impending orbit insertion of the Juno spacecraft. The 35-minute orbit insertion burn is scheduled to begin July 5 at 03:18 UTC (July 4 20:18, PDT). Juno gets one chance at a successful orbit insertion; if it overshoots Jupiter, it goes into an inclined solar orbit that likely won't ever return to the giant planet. At the briefing today, project manager Rick Nybakken said that it would take at least 20 minutes of rocket firing for Juno to enter orbit successfully, and 30 minutes for it to enter a good science orbit. If something happens during orbit insertion, the spacecraft has an auto-restart capability that will allow it to try to recover from an anomaly and continue firing the rocket within 500 seconds.

Following is a timeline of orbit-insertion-related events that I cobbled together from the JPL media schedule and the press kit. All times are Earth Received Time; the actual events unfold 48 minutes earlier than these times, according to the spacecraft clock. A live broadcast will take place on NASA TV during orbit insertion. I'll be reporting live (mostly on Twitter) from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Go Juno!