NASA’s Juno spacecraft successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit yesterday, the Fourth of July, giving scientists and space lovers something extra to celebrate. Engineers will flip the camera and science instruments back on this week and perform a complete check of the spacecraft to make sure everything is ready to go for the next 20 months. Mission controllers celebrated when Juno sent back radio signals confirming it reached its destination. It is the first spacecraft to orbit the planet since Galileo, which was deliberately crashed into Jupiter on September 21, 2003, to protect one of its discoveries – the possibility of an ocean beneath Jupiter’s moon Europa.
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“This is the king of our solar system and its disciples going around it”, added Bolton, who’s based at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. But Juno eventually needs to swoop in closer to do its job. The engine burn decreased Juno’s velocity by 1,212 miles per hour so that Jupiter’s gravity was able to capture the spacecraft. NASA stitched the images together and created a time-lapse video showing the moons in action.
The Juno program is run by the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but it is “very global”, with representatives from countries around the world, Helled said.
Heidi Becker, right, Juno radiation monitoring investigation lead, discusses the challenges of radiation the Juno spacecraft will encounter as Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager, left, looks on during a briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. on Monday, July 4, 2016.
“The science instruments will start collecting data, but we’re moving away from Jupiter”, he said. Also to be determined is how much water is there and if it has a rocky core. By studying its atmosphere, magnetic field, composition and internal structure, the scientists hope to learn what lies deep beneath the surface layers of this many-banded, red-eyed gas giant.
The arrival was a triumph for the $1.1 billion project to get closer to Jupiter, a mysterious “planet on steroids” where everything is extreme, the atmosphere is poisonous and the radiation is 1,000 times the lethal limit for a human, according to principal investigator Scott Bolton.
When Juno finishes its job, it will intentionally plunge into Jupiter’s atmosphere and burn up.
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Jupiter’s four largest moons.
