LOS ANGELES, Oct. 3 (Xinhua) -- NASA's Juno spacecraft to Jupiter successfully executed a 10.5-hour propulsive maneuver on Sept. 30 to keep the solar-powered spacecraft out of the shadow cast by Jupiter during its next close flyby of the planet on Nov. 3, 2019.
Juno began the maneuver at 7:46 p.m. EDT on Sept. 30 and completed it early on Oct. 1, according to a news release by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
It changed Juno's orbital velocity by 203 km per hour and consumed about 73 kg of fuel.
Without this maneuver, Juno would have spent 12 hours in transit across Jupiter's shadow -- more than enough time to drain the spacecraft's batteries.
Without power, and with spacecraft temperatures plummeting, Juno would likely succumb to the cold and be unable to awaken upon exit, said JPL.
"With the success of this burn, we are on track to jump the shadow on Nov. 3," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
"Jumping over the shadow was an amazingly creative solution to what seemed like a fatal geometry. Eclipses are generally not friends of solar-powered spacecraft. Now instead of worrying about freezing to death, I am looking forward to the next science discovery that Jupiter has in store for Juno," Bolton said.
Juno has been navigating in deep space since 2011. It entered an initial 53-day orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016.
