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Juno will fly by Earth on October 9, 2013. There is an event to encourage Amateur Radio Operators to say high to the satellite. What I'm trying to do is figure out if I have any chance of pulling it off. In order to do that, I need to know the distance to Juno at a particular moment in time. How might I best be able to figure this out?

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  • $\begingroup$ Did you try? If so, any luck? I thought the idea was if enough hams just point and shoot (transmit), the aggregate signal would only show as an elevated noise measurement at a certain moment. It wasn't like it would personally reply to people, was it? $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Apr 29, 2017 at 10:59
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    $\begingroup$ I did participate, and even got a nice card. They did detect some kind of a signal. $\endgroup$
    – PearsonArtPhoto
    Apr 29, 2017 at 11:02
  • $\begingroup$ I didn't know that Juno had time to stop by a post office, wow you're luck! ;) $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Apr 29, 2017 at 11:06
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    $\begingroup$ LOL. Basically anyone who made the attempt sent a notice to NASA, who sent out cards to everyone who attempted. $\endgroup$
    – PearsonArtPhoto
    Apr 29, 2017 at 11:07

2 Answers 2

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The JPL HORIZONS website is what you want for precise, tabulated values. Using the web interface, you can specify your position, and get all the info you could need for a given body (in your case, observer-centric (?) range to JUNO). It will also give you relevant parameters if you wanted to try and (visually) observe it, such as pointing angles, and the Sun-Spacecraft-Observer angle.

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The event web-site you posted shows theground-track, and a list of cities to orient a directional antenna .

This site also writes to say

See Juno’s current position, speed and more via NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System 3D interactive. Launch the Juno module or view Juno in the standard Eyes on the Solar System interface.

Hope this helps! I'm QRU unfortunately )+:

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