A couple of days before Juno launched, I was lucky enough to get to go in and visit Juno and say goodbye.
Juno was sort of on its side so that I could see all the instruments that I had worked on the last several years,
and walked around and said goodbye to each one and told them to have fun and to do a good job.
It's still something you can touch, and then you get that moment when you launch, and that's it.
You know, the kids graduate and there's nothing you can do after that.
The spacecraft is slowly starting to be enclosed by these ferrying walls, and it's the last time we're ever going to see it,
and that was very difficult in a way because this was like a child.
It was like a child that we brought along, and we would never see the child again.
[ANNOUNCER 01] L.C. you have permission to launch.
[ANNOUNCER 02] Roger, proceeding with the count.
I was really nervous. The whole thing sitting on top of a giant firecracker.
[ANNOUNCER] Ignition and lift off of the Atlas 5 with Juno!
And the hope is you’re going to control that firecracker.
When you stand back and you look at the whole scope of what we've gone through – building the spacecraft, testing it, launching it,
it's mind boggling just thinking about navigation to another planet.
There's an awful lot of collaboration and teamwork that goes into
flying a spacecraft and making it successful.
We are spread across the world and the science teams are across the U.S. We have our spacecraft team in Denver,
we also work with the navigation team, especially as we're preparing for maneuvers,
so it's really pretty widespread – the number of teams that we're interacting with on Juno.
At Lockheed, we do the full test program to test all the command sequences that are going to go to the spacecraft before they go to Jupiter.
It's called test as you fly and fly as you test, so that by the time we launch, we have really checked out our ground system and our spacecraft,
and we know that we're going to be able to communicate with it, because once it's launched–
there's no astronauts on our spacecraft so you have to be able to do everything remotely.
You just don’t aim and shoot and close your eyes. You really have to pay attention.
When we launch, we're set on a certain trajectory and then we have to monitor
and fine-tune the trajectory along the way.
When we launched we went out past Mars.
We fired our main engines, put us on the course to come by the sun, and fly by the Earth.
It’s called a gravity assist. It added roughly 70% of the velocity that we got at launch to the spacecraft.
And then the navigation team continues to track our course. We fine-tune things.
In the old days when sailors would navigate the seas and sail into uncharted waters,
they looked at the fixed patterns of known stars in the sky and used that to guide their way.
And we actually do it the same way on Juno.
We have a star tracker on Juno whose job is to take pictures of the stars
and recognize the fixed known positions of stars to tell the spacecraft where we're going. Where we're headed, as we go through these uncharted waters.
There's a lot of waiting when you're commanding a spacecraft that's that far away. And we send a command to the spacecraft,
it's typically an hour and a half later before we get confirmation that that got on board
and can launch whatever series of commands we just sent to see them execute.
We get excited about – just the way the spacecraft is performing.
Sometimes the engineers need reminding that we're there for the science because the engineering aspect of it is so cool.
While some of the most critical people of the mission
are the ones that actually operate the spacecraft. That built it, designed it,
the co-investigator group are folks that are essentially
have scientific questions about Jupiter they want to have answered,
and their main focus is on using the wonderful resource that Mission Juno and spacecraft Juno are to answer these scientific questions.
We have an awful lot of instruments and that sheer number is bigger than most of the other missions that we fly.
There are 9 instruments, but those instruments end up submitting a total of 11 different sequence input files and that is a lot of teams to work with.
They control their own commanding, but we have to make sure that it's not conflicting with other commands.
It’s on par with some of the biggest science missions NASA’s ever done.
But probably the highlight of all this was when we arrived to Jupiter.
And we had to fire the main engine for the most critical time for the Jupiter orbit insertion.
We’d been planning to arrive at Jupiter and execute that sequence for years.
It was an orbit insertion that had to happen. In the single worst environment that NASA has ever flown through.
In the middle of all of that, we got to get every system to work perfectly.
[ANNOUNCER] Almost there.
And my heart was beating out of my chest.
We burned the engines to do the orbit insertion and it cut off exactly on time, exactly like we had predicted – it was just absolutely perfect.
[ANNOUNCER] Juno, welcome to Jupiter.
We got the signal the main engine was complete, and I just threw my arms in the air, and it was just such a relief.
It was unbelievable. I mean, just, we made it to Jupiter, and there was no way I was going to keep it together in that moment.
And we had to prepare for the worst and we had a communications contingency plan. I was able to tear that up during that press conference.
We don't need that anymore!
It's pretty amazing when something that far away goes as perfectly as you had planned.
The future looks really, really bright. Not too bright cause you're a long way from the sun, but the mission's going really well.
The spacecraft is operating perfectly. It's a testament to good design practices, but more importantly it's a testament to the team.
The Juno team has always been really like a family.
We're able to merge together knowledge from a large group of collaborators all around the world.
Mission operations is a team effort. You need everyone, from the scientists who are kind of your rock stars,
but you need your support crew, the engineers, the cleaning staff – everyone has a piece and it's a team effort.
The remarkable thing about NASA is that they find a way to achieve
remarkable things harnessing the talent of a great many ordinary people.
We look at view graphs and charts, analysis all the time. What blows my mind is when I go out at night and I look at Jupiter, and I realize we're there.