Juno Position & Status

View of Juno’s position on May 10 from  NASA's Eyes on the Solar System.

As of May 10, Juno was approximately 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth. The one-way radio signal travel time between Earth and Juno is currently about 4.5 minutes. Juno is currently traveling at a velocity of about 16 miles (25 kilometers) per second relative to the sun, and increasing. Velocity relative to Earth is about 4.7 miles (7.6 kilometers) per second. Juno has now traveled 722 million miles (1.2 billion kilometers) since launch. 

The spacecraft is in excellent health and is operating nominally. Four instruments -- JEDI, MWR, Waves, and MAG -- are turned on.

Juno’s mission ops team performed a flush of the spacecraft’s main engine on May 1, firing the engine for a couple of seconds. The team does this maintenance activity about once per year to flush contaminants from the propellant lines that feed the main engine.

Available power to Juno’s solar arrays continues to increase as the spacecraft heads closer to the sun on approach to its Earth flyby gravity assist maneuver on Oct. 9. Juno is now approximately 1.45 AU from the sun (i.e., inside the orbit of Mars), after having reached a maximum distance from the sun of 210 million miles (338 million kilometers, or 2.3 AU) in Sept. 2012. The spacecraft reaches perihelion, the closest point to the sun in its orbit, in August 2013. An AU, or astronomical unit, is a convenient measure of distance between places in the solar system. It is equal to the distance from the Sun to Earth (93 million miles or 150 million kilometers). 


Members of the media, please contact:

D.C. Agle
Juno Media Relations Representative
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

(818) 393-9011
Dwayne Brown
NASA Public Affairs Officer
NASA Headquarters

(202) 358-1726

Where is Juno now?
