Once in orbit, Juno should beam back invaluable information about how Jupiter formed and what produces its extreme magnetic field, giving scientists more insight into the nature of our solar system and planetary formation in general. The solar-powered spacecraft is on it’s way toward Jupiter for the closest encounter with the biggest planet in our solar system. Juno will have to switch to autopilot when it does a 35-minute engine burn (setting hydrazine fuel on fire) then thrust in the opposite direction for the probe to “insert” itself into Jupiter’s orbit.
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“We are ready”, Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement.
Jupiter remains a largely unexplored planet due to its harsh conditions.
The spacecraft’s camera and other instruments were to be switched off for arrival, so there will be no pictures at the moment it reaches its destination.
If everything does work, Juno will spend the next 20 months taking unprecedented, high-resolution images of Jupiter, and peering deep beneath the gas giant’s cloud tops to discover what lies at its center. It features huge solar panels, measuring a total of 60 square meters, because the solar output is about 25 times weaker at Jupiter than Earth. Juno will become only the second spacecraft in history to orbit Jupiter, and it will be the first to conduct a polar orbit of the giant planet.
They will see if a almost five-year journey to Jupiter is a success or failure.
Juno will spend the next year and a half dodging the worst of Jupiter’s radiation belts and NASA engineers hope the craft’s shielded electronic center will help it survive the planet’s risky magnetic fields. Among the lingering questions: How much water exists?
NASA researchers will finally be able to determine whether Jupiter has a solid core or is composed entirely of gas. Why are Jupiter’s southern and northern lights the brightest in the solar system? It’s a gorgeous planet but what Juno is about is looking beneath that surface. A miscalculation could also send it too close, as its first orbit will put it at a very tight 2,900 miles from the top of Jupiter’s atmosphere. There’s also the mystery of its Great Red Spot. Recent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the centuries-old monster storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere is shrinking.
Nasa’s Juno spacecraft is set to arrive at the Solar System’s biggest planet on July 5, as it comes to the end of its five year, 365million mile journey.
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The mission aims to circle the planet 37 times before finally making a death plunge in 2018, to prevent the spacecraft from causing any damage to any of Jupiter’s icy moons, which NASA hopes to explore one day for signs of life.
