Juno completed first orbit around Jupiter

This was the first time all of the spacecraft’s scientific instruments had been powered on at once and focused on the planet.

Cruising at a breakneck speed of 130,000 miles per hour, Juno zipped around Jupiter on Saturday morning, passing as close as it will get to the massive gas giant throughout its main mission.

NASA’s Juno, the spacecraft on a Jupiter mission, has successfully completed its first of 36 orbital flybys, coming closer to the giant planet than any man-made object before it. The photos sent back to Earth thus far were taken when Juno was much farther from Jupiter so there are more awe-inspiring photos to come.

“We still have more testing to do, but we are confident that everything is working great, so for this upcoming flyby, Juno’s eyes and ears, our science instruments, will all be open”, said mission principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

“No other spacecraft has ever orbited Jupiter this closely, or over the poles in this fashion”, said Steve Levin, Juno project scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Bolton said, “we are getting some intriguing early data returns”. It will complete its mission in 2018, after which it will drop to its end in Jupiter’s atmosphere while still recording data. “It will take days for all the science data collected during [Juno’s] flyby to be downlinked and even more to begin to comprehend what Juno and Jupiter are trying to tell us”.

Writing in a blog post for the Planetary Society (which obsesses over the details of planetary missions), Emily Lakdawalla remarked on the “unusual view” provided by the image, which is top-down and nearly reveals Jupiter’s pimply looking northern pole.

NASA launch the Juno spacecraft in August 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Citation: Showstack, R. (2016), Juno makes closest ever orbit of Jupiter, Eos, 97, doi:10.1029/2016EO058313.

Anne Ball wrote this story for Learning English. Write to us in the Comments Section and visit us on our Facebook page.