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NASA's Juno Successfully Completes Jupiter Flyby
Jet Propuslion Laboratory
August 27, 2016

NASA's Juno mission successfully executed its first of 36 orbital flybys
of Jupiter today. The time of closest approach with the gas-giant world
was 6:44 a.m. PDT (9:44 a.m. EDT, 13:44 UTC) when Juno passed about 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) above Jupiter's swirling clouds. At the time,
Juno was traveling at 130,000 mph (208,000 kilometers per hour) with respect to the planet. This flyby was the closest Juno will get to Jupiter during
its prime mission.

"Early post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned
and Juno is firing on all cylinders," said Rick Nybakken, Juno project
manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

There are 35 more close flybys of Jupiter planned during Juno's mission (scheduled to end in February 2018). The August 27 flyby was the first
time Juno had its entire suite of science instruments activated and looking
at the giant planet as the spacecraft zoomed past.

"We are getting some intriguing early data returns as we speak," said
Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "It will take days for all the science data collected during the flyby to be downlinked and even more to begin to comprehend what Juno and Jupiter are trying to tell us."

While results from the spacecraft's suite of instruments will be released
down the road, a handful of images from Juno's visible light imager --
JunoCam -- are expected to be released the next couple of weeks. Those
images will include the highest-resolution views of the Jovian atmosphere
and the first glimpse of Jupiter's north and south poles.

"We are in an orbit nobody has ever been in before, and these images give
us a whole new perspective on this gas-giant world," said Bolton.

The Juno spacecraft launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and arrived at Jupiter on July 4, 2016. JPL manages the Juno mission for
the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute
in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is
managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama,
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems,
Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages
JPL for NASA.

More information on the Juno mission is available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/juno

The public can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:

http://www.facebook.com/NASAJuno

http://www.twitter.com/NASAJuno

News Media Contact
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov / laura.l.cantillo@nasa.gov

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