Armed with giant solar panels, the Yunon probe set a record, becoming the most distant space explorer, feeding on the energy of the Sun. A few days ago, the four-ton apparatus overcame the mark of 793 million kilometers, surpassing the previous record set by Rosetta by more than a million kilometers.
"Juno" has a 10-meter solar panels, which are located 18 698 solar cells - this allows the device to receive the necessary energy even where almost no light of the sun.
“Jupiter is five times farther from the Sun than the Earth, and it comes to 25 times less sunlight,” said Juno project manager Rick Nibakken.
A total of eight spacecraft in history have covered more than 800 million kilometers to Jupiter and beyond, and all of them were powered by a nuclear power plant. The new record is good, but the “Juno” launched in 2011 still has a lot of work ahead. The probe should arrive at the site on July 4 of this year, after which it will complete 33 orbits around a giant planet, approaching its surface at a distance of only 5,000 kilometers. NASA says the mission’s goal is to study dense cloud cover and powerful storms in order to “learn more about the planet’s origin, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.”
Based on materials from Engadget
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