The craft has become the first probe to enter Jupiter’s orbit since the space agency’s Galileo mission in 1995.
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To enter Jupiter’s orbit, Juno had to slow its speed to 1,212 mile per hour crawl, according to CNN.
Scientists in South Africa have congratulated the Juno mission team on their successful 5-year-long mission to Jupiter.
“We’re there. We’re in orbit”.
Willmih says a primary goal of Juno’s mission is to try to learn more about the core structure of Jupiter, which may tell a lot about other planets. The spacecraft’s instruments were also turned off during orbit insertion so that nothing would interfere with the engine burn. It looped around the inner solar system and then swung by Earth, using our planet as a gravity slingshot to hurtle toward the outer solar system.
“Some of the views that we’re going to have by its visible-light camera will give us close-up views of Jupiter’s clouds, down to a resolution of maybe 15 kilometers, so that’s an incredible view of this planet which is many thousands of kilometers across”. Juno has launched almost five years ago on a mission to study Jupiter’s composition and evolution. The stunningly surreal sequence shows the four Galilean moons surrounding the planet. It uncovered signs of an ocean beneath the icy surface of the moon Europa, considered a top target in the search for life outside Earth.
Users can select a point of interest in Jupiter’s atmosphere and share it with the community or browse through other users’ suggestions and comment on them. Its instruments will start to measure how much water is in the atmosphere. We are looking great.
“The spacecraft worked perfectly, which is always nice when you’re driving a vehicle with 1.7 billion miles on the odometer”, Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the press release.
While Juno’s solar array is quite large (overall spacecraft span is around 20 metres), the solar cells will collectively only generate an output of 500 watts given the distance Juno is from the sun. Juno was created to operate with that little power. But Juno eventually needs to swoop in closer to do its job.
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“We’re starting to realize Jupiter might be the key to our existence”, said Dr. Scott Bolton said, the mission’s lead scientific investigator at the Southwest Research Institute. Even so, Juno is expected to get blasted with radiation equal to more than 100 million dental X-rays during the mission.
