Mission controllers celebrated when Juno sent back radio signals confirming it reached its destination.
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The spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit after travelling for five years, across 1.7 billlion miles. The spacecraft’s observations and data should be able to help scientists better understand how Jupiter was formed, its early activities and by extension, the early days of the Solar System and perhaps even its origins, scientists said. It will take a special instrument and a lot of smarts to do all that. It was nearly the exact spot that NASA had aimed for.
This illustration depicts NASA’s Juno spacecraft successfully entering Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016.
Geoff Yoder, acting administrator for NASA’s Space Mission Directorate was elated as he said, “This is phenomenal!” One is a likeness of Galileo; the other two represent the Roman god Jupiter and his wife, Juno. So this video is the first tantalizing look at the gas giant from afar; the next photographs of Jupiter will be much, much closer. In 1610, famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei discovered the moons subsequently called Galilean, and he deduced from their movement over the course of multiple nights that they orbit Jupiter.
“The more you know about the mission you know just how tricky this was”.
“It’s a great day for Colorado”, said Juno program manager Tim Gasparrini.
“We are in it”, hollered Mr Scott Bolton, Nasa’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
The arrival was dramatic, with Juno firing its rockets on autopilot because of the time lag between Jupiter and Earth.
But while we wait for the first juicy images from Juno to arrive, NASA provided a little teaser from the spacecraft’s final approach to the planet.
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“With its suite of nine science instruments, Juno will investigate the existence of a solid planetary core, map Jupiter’s intense magnetic field, measure the amount of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere and observe the planet’s auroras”, a NASA blog post said. “We think the material we’re going to be sampling… is essentially primordial, so that tells us something about the beginning of the solar system”, explained Richard Thorne of the University of California, Los Angeles, one of the scientists working on the mission.
