NASA’s Juno Spacecraft to Gather Data on Jupiter’s Origin, Structure

NASA’s Juno spacecraft was launched five years ago to tease out some of those secrets, and it’s going to arrive at Jupiter in just a few weeks. The spinning motion and metallic hydrogen create a strong, donut-shaped magnetic field around the planet in which particles travel at nearly the speed of light. Galileo explored Jupiter and its moons for 14 years.

The endgame for any spacecraft that enters this doughnut-shaped field of high-energy particles is an encounter with the harshest radiation environment in the solar system.

The solar-powered spacecraft will perform a Jupiter orbit insertion maneuver-a 35-minute burn of its main engine-which will slow Juno by about 1,200 mph (542 meters per second) so it can be captured into the gas giant´s polar orbit.

Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California explains the precautions being taken – and why the mission is worth the risk – in a NASA media release.

The Juno spacecraft will circle the planet from pole to pole, cutting through to the constant cloud cover to study Jupiter’s auroras.

Juno will deploy a suite of scientific instruments to image and probe Jupiter and its atmosphere. Juno is running on solar power, with three huge panels created to face the sun during most of the mission. It is also reported that NASA is considering the Juno spacecraft’s entry into the planet as a crucial one as it will help them to get minor details about the Jupiter’s radiation belt as well.

“But, we are ready”. Getting this close to Jupiter does not come without a price – one that will be paid each time Juno’s orbit carries it toward the swirling tumult of orange, white, red and brown clouds that cover the gas giant. “This orbit allows us to survive long enough to obtain the tantalising science data that we have traveled so far to get”, Nybakken said.

NASA describes it as “the harshest radiation environment in the solar system”.

“At this time previous year our New Horizons spacecraft was closing in for humanity’s first close views of Pluto”, Diane Brown, Juno program executive at NASA’s headquarters, said in a news release.