Jupiter has new visitor _ a solar-powered spacecraft

In fact, size aside, the main difference between Jupiter and the sun is that the planet has a larger share of those trace elements, including carbon, nitrogen and sulfur.

Above: Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division, NASA, left, talks during a media briefing at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on Monday, July 4, 2016.

“This is phenomenal”, said Geoff Yoder, acting administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The spacecraft’s instruments had mostly been shut off in preparation for an engine burn that would slow it enough for a close encounter with Jupiter.

“We’re there. We’re in orbit”. This protective gear will allow Juno to circle Jupiter for an entire year without being fried by the planet’s radiation, some of the strongest in the solar system.

On the 37th orbit, scheduled for February 20, 2018, Juno is to make a suicidal dive into Jupiter, ending the mission, the same way that the Galileo spacecraft was disposed of in 2003.

“Juno, welcome to Jupiter”, said mission control commentator Jennifer Delavan of Lockheed Martin, which built Juno.

“What Juno’s about is looking beneath that surface”, Juno chief scientist Scott Bolton said before the arrival.

“I congratulate NASA on a successful journey to Jupiter and look forward to the great discoveries that await”.

Learn about the mission in store for the Juno spacecraft in this immersive MOAS planetarium show and explore how revealing the underlaying layers of this massive planet’s atmosphere may unravel clues on the formation of the solar system.

This unusual patient was an early version of the star tracker aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. But scientists still are puzzled by the gas giant. Most likely, it is some form of metallic, solid hydrogen, with perhaps a rocky core at the very center, a remnant of the birth of the planet itself. Its instruments will start to measure how much water is in the atmosphere. Early astronomers, for example, first discovered the huge red spot on Jupiter. It’ll pass over the poles 37 times during the mission on a path that avoids the most intense radiation.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has finally made it all the way to Jupiter.

Laughlin refers to the theory that Jupiter – in all its hulking glory – once bullied several planets out of the solar system.

“You have multiple moons going around Jupiter, and each one is going around at a different speed, based on its distance away from the planet”. And scientists do not want to risk having a radiation-fried satellite go off course and potentially contaminate a nearby moon like Europa, one of the solar system’s best candidates for finding microbial life.

Juno, 534 million miles from Earth, communicated with its creators with an agonizing 48-minute delay. But unlike its predecessor, the Galileo spacecraft that explored the planet between 1995 and 2003, Juno will study Jupiter much more thoroughly given the array of nine scientific instruments that it carries on board. The space agency is asking the public to help decide where to point the camera. One is a likeness of Galileo Galilei – the scientist who discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons.

The Juno probe gets its name from the Roman goddess and wife of Jupiter who was able to see through clouds. “That’s how well the Juno spacecraft performed tonight”.