27-07-2025
NASA Reveals How It Fixed A Camera 370-Million-Miles Away In Deep Space
JunoCam, which is a colour, visible-light camera on NASA's Juno spacecraft, suffered radiation damage while orbiting Jupiter. The exposure caused image noise and streaks. The space agency said that the mission team of the Juno spacecraft executed the deep-space move in December 2023 to repair its JunoCam imager in order to capture photos of the Jovian moon Io.
NASA engineers used an experimental technique called annealing, which means heating the camera to 77 degree F (25 degree C), to repair microscopic defects in the camera's silicon components.
The annealing process successfully restored JunoCam's function, allowing it to capture high-quality images of Jupiter's moon Io, including its north polar region with sulfur dioxide frosts and volcanic activity.
NASA said that the results from the "long-distance save" were presented during a technical session on July 16 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Nuclear & Space Radiation Effects Conference in Nashville.
"We knew annealing can sometimes alter a material like silicon at a microscopic level but didn't know if this would fix the damage," JunoCam imaging engineer Jacob Schaffner of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego said as quoted by NASA.
"We commanded JunoCam's one heater to raise the camera's temperature to 77 degrees Fahrenheit - much warmer than typical for JunoCam - and waited with bated breath to see the results."
Diagnosing and repairing the camera from 370 million miles away was a significant challenge, with the team relying on remote commands and waiting for results.
The success of the annealing technique has implications for future space missions, showing the potential for remote diagnostics and repair in deep space.
"After orbit 55, our images were full of streaks and noise," JunoCam instrument lead Michael Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems said as quoted by NASA. "We tried different schemes for processing the images to improve the quality, but nothing worked. With the close encounter of Io bearing down on us in a few weeks, it was Hail Mary time: The only thing left we hadn't tried was to crank JunoCam's heater all the way up and see if more extreme annealing would save us."
NASA plans to apply this technique to other instruments and subsystems on the Juno spacecraft, and it may benefit satellites in Earth's orbit and future space missions.
Despite the camera issue, Juno has continued to orbit Jupiter 74 times, providing valuable insights into the planet's atmosphere and polar regions.
