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NASA Jupiter-bound Spacecraft Set for Earth Fly-by

10 October 2013 00:51 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. NASA’s Juno spacecraft will fly within 347 miles (559 kilometers) of Earth Wednesday to get a slingshot-like power boost from the planet’s gravity that will hurl it into space at super speeds for the final leg of its journey to Jupiter, APA reports quoting RIA Novosti.

The gravity boost will create enough propulsion to allow Juno to pull away from the sun and coast to Jupiter, which is between 391 million miles (629 million kilometers) and 577 million miles (928 million kilometers) away from Earth, depending on where the two planets are in their elliptical orbits.

To try to explain how the slingshot effect will boost Juno’s speed, a member of the team that is working on the Juno mission at the Southwestern Research Institute (SRI) in Texas likened the effect to “throwing a rock at an oblique angle against a moving train,” with both objects going in the same direction.

Thanks to the gravity-aided spike, Juno will eventually reach speeds exceeding 165,000 mph (250,000 kph) as it flies toward Jupiter, making it the fastest manmade object in space.