- JunoCam suffered radiation damage causing image noise and streaks while orbiting Jupiter
- NASA used annealing by heating JunoCam to 25°C to repair silicon component defects
- Annealing restored JunoCam’s function, enabling clear images of Jupiter’s moon Io
JunoCam, a camera on NASA's Juno spacecraft, suffered radiation damage when it was orbiting Jupiter. The camera produced poor-quality images. The space agency revealed that the mission team of the spacecraft executed a deep-space move in December 2023 to repair the JunoCam imager so that it can capture photos of the Jovian moon Io.
According to the agency, NASA engineers used an experimental technique called annealing, in which the camera was heated at 25 degrees C to repair the microscopic defects.
The annealing process successfully restored JunoCam, allowing it to capture high-quality images of Jupiter's moon, including its north polar region with sulfur dioxide frosts and volcanic activity.
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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."
Understanding the issue and repairing the camera from 370 million miles away was challenging, as the team relied on remote commands. They also waited for results.
The success of the annealing technique can help in future space missions as well.
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"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.
