WEBVTT

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Jupiter has such a strong radiation environment

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that when we send all our sensors in to do their observations,

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there's a lot of challenges that have to be overcome to make sure that they can do that.

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Particularly with noise, all the high energy electrons and protons in the environment

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whiz through the instruments and create noise in the detectors and sensors.

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That kind of condition can be a catastrophic event for a device. It can destroy it.

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So, that's one of the radiation effects that has to be screened and understood when you're designing an instrument.

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Testing for the Jovian radiation environment on Earth is not easy.

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You have to go to a very high energetic electron facility

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which is a very rare type of facility on Earth for this kind of testing.

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It's not something that's commonly done. People don't do space missions to Jupiter very often.

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So, there isn't a big customer base for that.

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We've ended up going to facilities and hospitals that treat cancer patients

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or other facilities that are used to simulate nuclear blasts for submarines,

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very unusual places in all different parts of the world in order to mimic the Jovian radiation environment.

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Right now, we're looking at how we can understand what the environment

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is actually doing to our instruments while we're in-flight.

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We've modeled it. We've tested. We have a good idea of what will happen.

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But we can understand from the instrument telemetry and the science return,

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exactly what they're experiencing.

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If there are certain failures or graceful degradations

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that will be visible in that data stream coming down.

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The very extreme radiation environment,

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the very changing radiation environment.

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And other missions in the future will go to these locations and they will design based on what we'll be learning.