[ANNOUNCER] 3, 2, 1, ignition and liftoff! Of the Atlas 5 with Juno on a trek to Jupiter.
I started out in space as a baby. My father worked for the Chrysler corporation, which everyone thinks made cars,
which they did but at that time in Michigan they made something called the red stone and the Jupiter rockets.
Those rockets were used to launch the first American astronaut into space.
My title in the Juno mission is co-investigator. Co-investigators are a group of engineers and mainly scientists
who are focused on specific scientific objectives of the mission.
Transmission of data from the spacecraft back to Earth is extremely important to successful scientific study of Jupiter.
The first science pass we had, perijove 1, was the most amazing experience
because it was the first time that Juno had its eyes open,
and when that data started coming down, it was so amazing.
Every single instrument and investigation was seeing something gorgeous or ground breaking or unexpected,
and it was like this cornucopia of amazing data that I never imagined.
When you discover something brand new and it’s sort of a major discovery and Juno’s getting plenty of them,
you’re one of the first people in the world to realize something new. It’s incredibly exciting. It’s a rush.
One of the most rewarding thing for me on Juno is just watching those scientists see and look at the data they've been waiting for decades to see.
It's fun to see that, that kind of curiosity and joy in a lot of their eyes and then watching people put up this what I've learned,
these are the images they've taken, and people just standing up and cheering.
Everyone is showing and sharing and usually saying I have no idea what this means yet
And we get together every single time we have a science pass to do the same thing,
and every single time we're learning a little bit more or we're getting another gorgeous image. It just keeps getting more different and interesting.
The DSN is the Deep Space Network, and it is 3 complexes. One's located in Spain and one's in California.
One's in Australia, which allows us to interact with the spacecraft.
We have a lot of instruments on the spacecraft and each one has data to send down to Earth.
Well it’s a long way to Jupiter so our data rate is very slow. It’s about like your own telephone modem.
That’s the kind of rate of data we get for our spacecraft down to the ground.
We send the data back in the form of bits a whole stream of 1s and 0s.
Right now the spacecraft is 849 million kilometers from Earth so the data takes 48 minutes or so to get to Earth.
It's remarkable to think it takes light that long to go from here to there.
Those data signals are separated apart. The ones that involve spacecraft operations are delivered and are monitored by the spacecraft operations team,
and the ones that involve science data are fed directly to the science teams through a science data pipeline.
Once each team receives their own data set, the data is calibrated, the data is analyzed so to make sure first that it’s correct and there aren’t errors in the data
You know which can sometimes come from transmission over such a long distance.
And then put into a form, in which the instrument team can actually use the data to understand what’s going on in Jupiter.
I lead Juno's radiation monitoring investigation. My investigation is all about taking the noise from penetrating radiation
that influences and impacts the images in our science instruments and turning that noise into science data.
[AUDIO]
Noise is not a good thing usually so those who are interested in keeping the positions of the spacecraft
what we call attitude perfectly matched, found those particle signals to be annoying,
but what Dr. Becker has shown is that they're very insightful in understanding the environment around Jupiter.
We take the images and do special processing to only pull out the noise from radiation, and we throw the rest of the image away,
the part that most people would normally keep. That snow, those dots and squiggles that corrupt the image of the stars
is actually what we're counting, and by counting what we see in the image,
we can actually understand what the environment is on the outside so that's one example of one person's noise being another person's music.
Initially, our plan with our microwave radiometer was to look through the clouds and see what’s going on deep in the atmosphere.
But then, we would get these occasional pulses of energy.
Well, just like on your AM radio, it turned out that those were pulses from lightning bolts on Jupiter.
So we found by chance that we not only were able to measure the nature of Jupiter's atmosphere but we were also able to measure the occurrence of lightning.
Already we’re re-writing the text-books on Jupiter and how giant planets work. Every aspect of Jupiter is so different then what we thought.
The key is recognizing something you don't understand in your data
and drilling down on that to discover things that you never anticipated when you set out to do this job.
Just in terms of the magnetometer investigation, for example, we set out to measure the magnetic field very accurately,
and then during cruise we found, that we can detect dust particle impact on the spacecraft.
These are tiny little speeding bullets impacting the solar arrays.
Nobody's ever been able to measure these things before. We call it serendipity science because it just kind of falls in your lap.
It shows you why it's so important to go and to explore. If we knew what we were going to find,
we wouldn't build a spacecraft like this that can do these amazing things and go into these environments if we knew the answer at the end.
We don’t know how it’ll change us or how it’ll change our view of the world so that’s the whole point.