Jupiter has such a strong radiation environment
that when we send all our sensors in to do their observations,
there's a lot of challenges that have to be overcome to make sure that they can do that.
Particularly with noise, all the high energy electrons and protons in the environment
whiz through the instruments and create noise in the detectors and sensors.
That kind of condition can be a catastrophic event for a device. It can destroy it.
So, that's one of the radiation effects that has to be screened and understood when you're designing an instrument.
Testing for the Jovian radiation environment on Earth is not easy.
You have to go to a very high energetic electron facility
which is a very rare type of facility on Earth for this kind of testing.
It's not something that's commonly done. People don't do space missions to Jupiter very often.
So, there isn't a big customer base for that.
We've ended up going to facilities and hospitals that treat cancer patients
or other facilities that are used to simulate nuclear blasts for submarines,
very unusual places in all different parts of the world in order to mimic the Jovian radiation environment.
Right now, we're looking at how we can understand what the environment
is actually doing to our instruments while we're in-flight.
We've modeled it. We've tested. We have a good idea of what will happen.
But we can understand from the instrument telemetry and the science return,
exactly what they're experiencing.
If there are certain failures or graceful degradations
that will be visible in that data stream coming down.
The very extreme radiation environment,
the very changing radiation environment.
And other missions in the future will go to these locations and they will design based on what we'll be learning.