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The Juno spacecraft is on its way to Jupiter after being launched on Friday at 11:25 am ET.

Funny thing about space, while going from point A to point B in a straight line maybe the shortest route this does not mean it is the most fuel efficient one.  Jupiter at the time of launch is 445 million miles / 716 million km away, however Juno will make what amounts to a couple of loops that will take it on a 1.74 BILLION mile/2.8 BILLION km journey.  See NASA’s cartoon of the path.

So in about two years (October 9, 2013) the spacecraft will actually fly past Earth again and at one point will only be 311 miles away.  This is done in order to gain a gravity assist in order to boost the spacecraft’s speed by about 16,300 miles per hour.  There will be another engine burn by the spacecraft to fine tune the trajectory after Juno is past Earth and all of these adjustments should put Juno into orbit on July 4, 2016.

The “DSM” you see on the graphic linked above is a Deep Space Maneuver, there are two and as far as I know one is to use the high gain antenna and checking and calibrating the science instruments.

And just for fun, when Juno gets to Jupiter we won’t know it for 48 minutes and 19 seconds as that is the time for the radio signals to traverse the one way distance from Juno to us.

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