Even though you were probably looking up at the sky last night taking in the fireworks, you wouldn’t have been able to see Juno enter Jupiter’s orbit – even with a super-powered telescope. The success of this journey has set a great example for how future space travels will be, considering its superior engineering. The precisely timed, 308-second burst from the main engine burn slowed the craft enough to be captured by the mighty gravity field of the fiery gas giant.
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Juno’s mission, which cost more than 1 billion U.S. dollars, involves studying Jupiter’s chemical composition and magnetic field. Galileo, the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter, met the same fate after a 14-year mission.
Galileo, a mission launched in 1989, circled the planet for almost a decade, sending back lovely views of the planet and its many moons. We’re very pleased with its performance, but again we’ve got a lot of work in front of us to really dive into that and see how it’s going to do.
And it used ultraviolet imaging to capture Jupiter’s extremely powerful auroras.
A solar-powered spacecraft is spinning toward Jupiter for the closest encounter with the biggest planet in our solar system.
With its billowy clouds and colorful stripes, Jupiter is an extreme world that likely formed first, shortly after the sun.
Over the next 20 months, scientists hope to learn more about the planet’s composition and uncover new clues about how our solar system began. And in 1989 NASA launched its Galileo spacecraft to study it and its moons.
Juno’s mission: To peer through Jupiter’s cloud-socked atmosphere and map the interior from a unique vantage point above the poles. Because Jupiter is such a large planet, the more water it soaks up, the less there is for other planets in the system.
This should give scientists an indication as to whether the planet harbors a solid core, something planetary scientists have theorized to exist but have never confirmed.
“Now the fun begins – the science”, Bolton said after Juno’s arrival Monday.
The data that we will get from Juno will be new and extremely fascinating. Recent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the centuries-old monster storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere is shrinking.
A NASA mission to Jupiter took a giant leap on Monday night, completing a 1.8 billion mile space trek. Juno is also the first spacecraft to fly 3-D printed titanium parts.
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Juno has several science instruments on board, along with a color camera and three Lego figurines.
