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 over 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 fairing walls and it's the last time we're ever gonna 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 Elsie
you have permission to launch Roger proceeding with the count I was
really nervous the whole thing sitting on top of a giant firecracker ignition
and liftoff of the Atlas 5 with Juno and the hope is you're gonna control
that firecracker
when 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 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 were
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 a course to come by the Sun and fly by the earth
this is 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 weight with you're commanding a
spacecraft that's that far away when we send a command to the spacecraft
it's typically an hour and a half later before we get confirmation that that got
onboard and can watch 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 that the
co-investigator group are folks that essentially have scientific questions
about Jupiter they want to have answer and their main focus is on using the
wonderful resource that missions you know and spacecraft you know 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
nine 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 has ever done but probably the highlight of all this was when we
arrived at Jupiter and we had to fire the main engine for the most critical
time for them to patrol but insertion we've been planning to arrive at Jupiter
and execute that sequence for years it was an orbit insertion that had to
in the single worst environment that NASA has ever flown through in the
middle of all of that we've got to get every system to work perfectly Jason's
on June according 72 tone for minima burn timers almost herbs 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 you know we got the signal the manion's knows 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 gonna keep it
together in that moment but yeah and we had to prepare for the worst and we have
a communications contingency plan I was able to tear that up during that press
conference pretty amazing when something that far away it goes as perfectly as
you had planned no the future looks really really bright not too bright
because you're a long way from the Sun but the missions 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 --is from a large group of collaborators
all around the world Mission Operations is a team effort you need everyone from
the scientists or kind of you're 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 the view
graphs and charts and 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
you