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mattlondon 8 days ago

Even if they have no fuel/not enough fuel, can they at least point it in the right direction? Better than nowt?

ben_w 8 days ago | parent [-]

If the probe doesn't have enough fuel to leave Jupiter's orbit, we get a better view of it from here with our much bigger optics.

Sure, the closest approach of 3I/Atlas to Jupiter is 53.56±0.45 Gm, the closest approach of 3I/Atlas to Earth is 268.98±0.3 Gm — but we have more and better sensors down here.

For photographs in particular, Juno's JunoCam is spectacularly bad, because "it was put on board primarily for public science and outreach, to increase public engagement, with all images available on NASA's website" — while it can be used for actual science, at the orbital apsis (8.1 Gm) it has a worse resolution, when looking at Jupiter, than Hubble gets of Jupiter from LEO (a distance of ~600 Gm for https://esahubble.org/images/heic0910q/).