NASA hacks and fixes malfunctioning camera 370 million miles from Earth

In a major feat, NASA has managed to remotely hack and fix a camera on the Juno craft that it sent to Jupiter.

When you’re operating in deep space, time moves more slowly. That’s why it took 19 months for NASA to announce that attempts by the mission team of its Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft to repair its JunoCam imager were successful.

JunoCam had already exceeded all expectations by December 2023. NASA designed this color, visible-light camera to survive for only eight orbits of Jupiter. That’s about 400 Earth days.

The agency wasn’t confident at all that the imager could last longer because its optical unit is outside the titanium-walled radiation vault that hosts the probe’s electronics. However, the JunoCam actually worked for Juno’s first 34 orbits.

Soon, though, the camera “began showing hints of radiation damage,” NASA explained. By orbit 56, nearly all the images were corrupted.

In a way, this wasn’t surprising because Juno’s travels carry it through the most intense planetary radiation fields in the solar system. But NASA thought it knew what happened and what to do.

According to the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, clues pointed to a damaged voltage regulator that’s vital to JunoCam’s power supply.

With few options for recovery – flying a new craft to Jupiter was obviously off the table – the team turned to a process called annealing, where a material is heated for a specified period before slowly cooling.

Although the process is not well understood, the idea is that the heating can reduce defects in the material.

Juno’s travels carry it through the most intense planetary radiation fields in the solar system.

“We knew annealing can sometimes alter a material like silicon at a microscopic level, but didn’t know if this would fix the damage,” said JunoCam imaging engineer Jacob Schaffner of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, which designed and developed JunoCam and is part of the team that operates it.

“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.”

The idea worked, and the crispness has returned – but not for long. The camera’s output quickly degraded again, so NASA tried annealing once more, this time turning the heater to maximum.

“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,” said JunoCam instrument lead Michael Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems.

The trick worked. Images began to improve dramatically, and as the example below clearly demonstrates, were almost as good as the day the camera launched by December 30th, 2023.

To date, the solar-powered spacecraft has orbited Jupiter 74 times. Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said this whole story would become a useful lesson on very remote spacecraft repair.

“Juno is teaching us how to create and maintain spacecraft tolerant to radiation, providing insights that will benefit satellites in orbit around Earth,” said Bolton.

“I expect the lessons learned from Juno will be applicable to both defense and commercial satellites as well as other NASA missions.”