NASA’s Space Probe Juno Finally Made It To Jupiter

Forget the fireworks, the most exciting Fourth of July show in the universe happened 1.7 billion miles away where NASA’s Juno spacecraft completed its five-year journey into Jupiter’s orbit.

Ground controllers at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lockheed Martin, which built Juno, burst into applause upon hearing the news from the craft that she was now orbiting Jupiter’s poles.

Scientists believe Jupiter may be the first planet to form in our solar system, and it could hold clues about how the solar system changed over time. “If we want to understand how systems of planets form, Jupiter is a critical piece of the puzzle”, says NASA.

We still don’t know Jupiter’s composition or how the giant swirling storms are connected to the interior of the planet. Any rock that get caught in the planet’s powerful gravity will swirl around at an incredible speed and carry certain doom if it hits Juno.

Along its 2.8-billion-kilometre journey, Juno became the first spacecraft to travel a long distance, operating strictly by the sun. Juno project scientist Steve Levin said it will start to answer the “big questions” about Jupiter and the solar system.

“This is the one time I don’t mind being stuck in a windowless room on the night of the 4th of July”, said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. NASA plans to send a probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa, an icebound world that is thought to have a warm water ocean and perhaps life, in the next decade.

In the coming days, Juno will turn its instruments back on, but the real work won’t begin until late August when the spacecraft swings in closer. Juno is created to pass very close to learn more about Jupiter’s magnetic fields, radiation and gravity, it’ll also peer down under the clouds to work out how much water the planet may hold. Only the Galileo spacecraft, has ever moved around Jupiter, which is itself orbited by 67 known moons. Jupiter has intense radiation fields that rise from its cloudy surface, and scientists hope the titanium will protect the instruments, at least for a while, according to Jim Green, NASA’s planetary science division director.