Precessing
I'm wondering what will make the successive orbits precess like that. Is it the slight gas drag each time the spacecraft passes near the planet?
The Juno is on its way back to Jupiter after successfully reaching 'apojove', the high point of its first orbit of the gas giant. And now the craft is heading for its closest encounter with Jupiter. Juno's mission plan called for it to enter the planet's gravitational sphere of influence and slow down by making two “capture …
I thought of that, but the probe's orbit is polar, so any deflection due to Jupiter's orbital progress would appear as a change in the probe's orbital plane, not in the major axis direction. Also the science orbits are depicted as slightly smaller each time, which would fit with the idea of losing a little velocity on each pass.
Nasa has a great 3d sim app for visualizing the orbits here.
After it finally starts, click the "Juno Mission" button in the upper right and then go to "Juno's Trajectories" on the left.
Maybe, but probably not. Juno is supposed to be incinerated in Jupiter's atmosphere in order to prevent any possible contamination of Jupiter's moons. While there will be still power*, at some point there won't be enough fuel left for any manouvering. If everything that's yet to happen goes better than expected, they might be able to expand the mission for a couple of days/weeks, but that's it.
*This has been discussed at length in several threads in the comments. Wear and tear of solar panels in space, pros and cons of RTGs, etc.
> 'the probe reached the apogee of the first capture orbit, dubbed “apojove” by NASA'
I think you'll find that NASA is correct here. 'Apogee' is the highest point of an orbit around the Earth specifically. 'Apoapsis' is the generic high-point of any orbit, 'apojove' is the high-point of an orbit around Jupiter specifically.
Somebody has not played the requisite amount of Kerbal Space Program to correctly report on orbital maneuvers it seems ;)
I understand what you are saying, but where is the logic in giving a planet-specific name to the same mathematical position ?
Are we going to end up reading about apoton, apoturn, apocure, apomede, apores, apoDA14 etc, in other words one apo- for every single planet/dwarf/moon/asteroid we have a satellite orbiting ?
That'll get tiresome rather quickly, I think.