The Day Job for Juno's SRU (Artist's Concept)
This animation illustrates how the Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) star camera aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft supports "attitude determination" -- the knowledge of which way Juno is pointing as the spacecraft navigates through space. The SRU takes images of star fields and searches for bright stars with known positions to help Juno obtain its bearings.
JunoCam's raw images are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products.
More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.