Juno’s mission is to peer through Jupiter’s cloud-socked atmosphere and map the interior from a unique vantage point above the poles. “#Juno is now orbiting #Jupiter, poised to unlock the planet’s secrets”, NASA tweeted.
Advertisement
Named after Jupiter’s cloud-piercing wife, Juno is only the second mission created to spend time at Jupiter.
Cheers and applause erupted in mission control at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology when a signal arrived confirming the burn was complete at around 4.54am.
The changes in the particles and fields around the spacecraft was detected by the Science instruments on board when it passed from an environment dominated by the interplanetary solar wind into Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
“This is the king of our solar system and its disciples going around it”, he said.
After a five year journey culminating in an intense battle with Jupiter’s insane belts of radiation, their Juno spacecraft finally slipped into the planet’s orbit.
After 37 orbits around Jupiter, Juno will descend into the planet’s atmosphere on February 20, 2018, where it will burn up. It was the first step in Juno’s 1.7 billion-mile voyage to the gas giant planet, Jupiter.
The mission’s chief scientist, Scott Bolton, congratulated his team saying “you’ve just done the hardest thing Nasa’s ever done”.
After Juno, a spinning robotic NASA spacecraft built like a tank entered into the orbit of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, search engine giant Google celebrated the momentous occasion with a doodle on its homepage.
Like Galileo, which circled Jupiter for eight years before crashing into the planet in 2003, Juno’s demise is created to prevent any hitchhiking microbes from Earth from inadvertently contaminating Jupiter’s ocean-bearing moon Europa, a target of future study for extraterrestrial life. NASA’s Juno Spacecraft have traveled for 1.8bn miles for five years to enter the elliptical orbit after burning for 35 minutes.
What are the great mysteries about Jupiter? Its camera and other instruments were also powered off as a precaution.
As shown in the video, the innermost moon is volcanic Io; next in line is the ice-crusted ocean world Europa, followed by massive Ganymede, and finally, heavily cratered Callisto.
Jupiter’s magnetic field is almost 20,000 times as powerful as Earth’s, and the planet is surrounded by an intense radiation belt.
Advertisement
Bolton also said Juno is likely to discover more moons around Jupiter, which is already known to have 67. The spacecraft will orbit the poles and to protect it against the radiation scientists have used shielded electronics vault.
