The spacecraft’s velocity was slowed to 1,212 miles per hour, which allowed the craft to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity.
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The Juno team celebrates at Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“Jupiter orbit insertion was a big step and the most challenging remaining in our mission plan, but there are others that have to occur before we can give the science team the mission they are looking for”, Nybakken said in a statement. But Juno should be able to withstand the harsh conditions because it’s “built like an armoured tank”, he said. As a precaution, its camera and science instruments were turned off during the arrival. NASA stitched the images together and created a time-lapse video showing the moons in action. “Most of the planets that have been recently discovered that are outside the solar system are Jupiter-like, they are also gas giants”, he says.
The latest probe of Jupiter is moving in closer than ever to the huge planet, and the head of the Illinois State University Planetarium is watching closely. Unlocking its history may hold clues to understanding how Earth and the rest of the solar system developed.
Juno would be facing a number of challenges as it gathers data on the planet, as well, especially since Jupiter’s radiation belts send out electrons, protons and ions around the massive planet at nearly the speed of light. Galileo was deliberately crashed into Jupiter on September 21, 2003, to protect one of its discoveries – a possible ocean beneath Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Juno’s mission: To peer through Jupiter’s cloud-socked atmosphere and map the interior from a unique vantage point above the poles. Is there a solid core?
There’s also the mystery of its Great Red Spot.
According to CNET, Bova is a veteran author who has predicted the future of space, science, and technology, and he has written books about Jupiter that predict the possibility of life on the world. Juno was created to operate with that little power.
In January this year, NASA’s Juno broke the record for humanity’s most distant solar powered spacecraft.
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The spacecraft will orbit Jupiter a total of 37 times, staying at the planet for almost a year and a half before crashing down through the planet’s atmosphere in 2018.
