Juno spacecraft comes ever closer to Jupiter

As Juno approaches Jupiter it is travelling at than more than 241,000 km/h, making Juno one of the fastest man-made objects ever built.

Before turning all of its attention to an orbit insertion at Jupiter, the Juno craft took this image of its target planet and surrounding moons.

This will require the probe to execute a ideal braking manoeuvre using its British-made rocket engine. A mathematical marvel, if executed correctly Juno will then be caught in the planet’s gravitational pull and carry out a 53-day orbit of Jupiter.

At 8:18 p.m. PDT (11:18 p.m. EDT; 3:18 a.m. UTC/July 5), Juno’s 35-minute main-engine burn will begin.

“We believe probability is incredibly low that we’re going to hit one, but it’s not zero”, said Bolton. “So we’re really excited to see what we might discover out of Europa”.

There’s also the mystery of its Great Red Spot. Principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas told the BBC: “Everything about Jupiter is extreme; it’s a planet on steroids”.

This illustration depicts NASA’s Juno spacecraft at Jupiter, with its solar arrays and main antenna pointed toward the distant sun and Earth.

“Everything about it is “the most”.

“We have to deal with this environment, and the spacecraft is literally an armoured tank”. Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field surrounds the planet with a doughnut-shaped field of high-energy electrons, protons, and ions traveling at almost the speed of light.

“The engineers and mission controllers are performing at an Olympic level getting Juno successfully into orbit”.

“[Without it], Juno would be experiencing a radiation dose of over 20 million rads, which is like a human undergoing 100 million dental X-rays in a little over a year”, she explained.

“If Jupiter formed far from the sun, where it is cold, out of blocks of ice….you would get a different amount of water inside Jupiter than if it formed closer to the sun than it is now”, Dr Levin added. It was quite spectacular to watch the spacecraft leave the planet.

The uncertainty over the presence of a solid core should be resolved with the aid of very precise gravity measurements. Scientists still aren’t sure exactly what Jupiter looks like on the inside. A second burn in mid-October will tighten the orbit to just 14 days.

When it named this mission, NASA acknowledged its difficulty.

Juno will be commanded to end operations by ditching itself in the atmosphere of the planet.