In a major feat, NASA has managed to remotely hack and fix a camera on the Juno craft that it sent to Jupiter.

When you’re operating in deep space, time moves more slowly. That’s why it took 19 months for NASA to announce that attempts by the mission team of its Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft to repair its JunoCam imager were successful.

JunoCam had already exceeded all expectations by December 2023. NASA designed this color, visible-light camera to survive for only eight orbits of Jupiter. That’s about 400 Earth days.

The agency wasn’t confident at all that the imager could last longer because its optical unit is outside the titanium-walled radiation vault that hosts the probe’s electronics. However, the JunoCam actually worked for Juno’s first 34 orbits.

Soon, though, the camera “began showing hints of radiation damage,” NASA explained. By orbit 56, nearly all the images were corrupted.

In a way, this wasn’t surprising because Juno’s travels carry it through the most intense planetary radiation fields in the solar system. But NASA thought it knew what happened and what to do.

According to the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, clues pointed to a damaged voltage regulator that’s vital to JunoCam’s power supply.

Source: Cybernews