A Bay County company is having an impact some 540 million miles away.
Emcor Inc. designed and manufactured stainless steel ball screws that make up a portion of the NASA spacecraft Juno, which reached Jupiter on Monday, July 4.
Juno, only the second mission designed to spend time at Jupiter, left the Earth in 2011. Scientists have promised close-up views of the planet when Juno skims the cloud tops during a 20-month, $1.1 billion mission.
NASA has released a time-lapse video of planet Jupiter and four of its moons as spacecraft Juno approached the gas giant in June.
Emcor, located in the 24,000-square-foot Valley Center Technology Park in Monitor Township, made the leap from serving the auto industry to aerospace, defense, and medical devices in the early 2000s.
The company built the ball screws in 2009, and company officials did not realize how big of a project they were involved in until they began seeing news reports about Juno, said Emcor President Kyle O’Brien.
“We were proud to be a part of that,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien said the ball screw assemblies, while small, are an important part of Juno, as they help keep the rotation of the spacecraft correct. The craft is put off balance when it uses fuel to propel itself, and the ball screws help the solar panels get realigned, O’Brien said.
O’Brien said the company did not know at first what the ball screws were for. Eventually, Lockheed Martin, which built Juno, “came to tell us that’s what they were doing,” O’Brien said.
In addition to the screws on Juno, Emcor also has developed a specialized 15-foot ball screw for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to replace the Hubble Telescope in 2018.
The fifth rock from the sun and the heftiest planet in the solar system, Jupiter is what’s known as a gas giant — a ball of hydrogen and helium — unlike rocky Earth and Mars.
With its billowy clouds and colorful stripes, Jupiter is an extreme world that likely formed first, shortly after the sun. Unlocking its history may hold clues to understanding how Earth and the rest of the solar system developed.
Juno’s real work won’t begin until late August, when the spacecraft swings in closer. Plans called for Juno to swoop within 3,000 miles of Jupiter’s clouds — closer than previous missions — to map the planet’s gravity and magnetic fields in order to learn about the interior makeup.
Among the lingering questions: How much water exists? Is there a solid core? Why are Jupiter’s southern and northern lights the brightest in the solar system?
Like the spacecraft Galileo before it, Juno will meet its demise when it deliberately dives into Jupiter’s atmosphere and disintegrates — a necessary sacrifice to prevent any chance of accidentally crashing into the planet’s potentially habitable moons.
“It’s a bit odd to know that parts that we made will be up there … for however long until they disintegrate,” O’Brien said. “That’s something we’ve never done before, and we haven’t done it since. But we’d like to again.”
Source: MAMA