July 8, 2016
The weekend is here—hooray! It has been a busy week with much accomplished. I’ve attached my post from the Juno orbit insertion because it was special to me. At the very bottom you will find the Sudoku puzzle for this weekend. Also, Meditation finished eating and decided to J-hang on July 6th and is now in chrysalis (big smile). Meditation made a wider silk than Piglet to hold the chrysalis which I find interesting.
The third caterpillar in the picture you haven’t met yet, that’s Broke-and-Proud. You can see it some in the fourth picture; one of the antennae is broken, but it never stopped B-n-P who is now J-hanging this morning. I will try to remember to post B-n-P’s J-hang next week.
July 4 – July 5, 2016
I’m starting this post on July 4th, 2016. We’ve had a wonderful day. Superhero and I started our countdown party about seven hours out from Juno’s orbital insertion. At about six hours out I thought, why am I not sharing this?
So, I posted a few picks on Facebook as an invite to anyone else interested who may not have known it was going on. Jupiter holds a unique place for me in my love of the universe. I hope this stays active forever because it is awesome.
My plan is to stay up through the night to watch the process. I am use to projects running through midnight and since I write science fiction it seems like the perfect way to spend the transition of one day to the next.
The countdown continues and I’m in rewrite mode as I intermittently view the clock while I work. If I told you what I wrote last year, revised, fine tuned to precision four days ago, then experienced three days ago you wouldn’t believe me.
It is anticipated that it will take about thirty-five minutes after Juno begins insertion for it to reopen systems for us to know if it has been successful. Thirty-five minutes is a long time to hold your breath and hope Juno’s burn alters the velocity to create a trajectory to get pulled into Jupiter’s orbit and not be lost in space.
Thirty six minutes passed and I anticipated news to come shortly. It was approximately forty minutes after initiation of the Jupiter orbit insertion that NASA signaled—Woohoo! At around 12:08 am (EDT) July 5, 2016 my time NASA indicated that Juno appeared on task. NASA official report is 11:53 pm (EDT) or 8:53 (PDT) July 4, 2016 for success of the burn. I can’t tell you how much I love that. I videoed the countdown and reverse count for the burn, but video will not show well here.
It is now 1:46 am July 5, 2016 here. The post-Juno insertion orbital briefing was at 1:00 am and they have some photos now (about 17 days condensed into three minutes). The briefing will be posted again I think around 9:00 am (EDT) today if you, for some reason, missed the one at 1:00 am (wink).
Special thanks to Superhero for supporting my science and writing habit.
Below is the Sudoku puzzle for this weekend.
Progress on the rewrite is slow but productive. I remind myself when phrases like ‘she placed’ are still in the manuscript that this is the query copy edit, not the word copy edit. Once I feel confident all the structure is secure: grounded well in science, mathematically reproducible, visibly stable, forward moving, and cohesive; then, I will copy edit for word precision. It sounds like I’ve got an even busier weekend—yay!