NASA’s Juno spacecraft, in orbit round Jupiter, had an enormous drawback when its JunoCam imager began to fail after sitting by means of the planet’s harsh radiation belts for therefore many orbits. Designed to solely final by means of the preliminary few orbits, JunoCam astonishingly endured 34 orbits. But by the forty seventh orbit, the consequences of radiation harm grew to become seen, and by the 56th orbit, photographs had been virtually illegible. With few options and time slipping away earlier than an in depth flyby of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, engineers made a daring however inventive gamble. Using an annealing course of, they sought to resuscitate the imager by warming it up—an experiment that proved profitable.
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