NASA spacecraft barreling toward Jupiter for July 4 meetup

Moritz Heimpel is building his own.

Beneath the giant planet’s cloud tops sits a layer of hydrogen that acts as an electrical conductor due to its being under extreme levels of pressure.

Yet, Dr. Heimpel is not so buried in his virtual world that he doesn’t care about the real thing.

On July 4, a NASA probe will dive deep into arguably the most unsafe region of the solar system: Jupiter’s radiation belts.

Until now, Jupiter has only been observed from vantage points around its equator – and at reasonably safe distances.

Fox News reported that the Juno will try to find out more about Jupiter as to when and how the planet was formed.

“Over the life of the mission, Juno will be exposed to the equivalent of over 100 million dental X-rays”, said Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager, said.

Most observations of Jupiter’s weather are done by amateurs, who can talk about bands changing color, the size of the Great Red Spot shrinking, and other phenomena on the solar system’s larger planet.

“It was the first planet to form, so it gives you that very first step [of] what happened after the sun formed that allowed the planets to form because that’s really the history of not only our system but us here at Earth”.

NASA’s Juno Mission is expected to spend up to 20 months studying Jupiter, collecting data relating to its origins, magnetosphere, or the planet’s area of magnetic influence.

But spying on the inner workings of a behemoth does not come without risk.

This artist’s illustration shows NASA’s Juno spacecraft making one of its close passes over Jupiter. A day on planet Jupiter is only about ten hours long.

How much water is inside Jupiter? Weighing almost 400 pounds (172 kilograms), the vault will reduce exposure to radiation by 800 times of that outside its titanium walls. But whether that will be enough is an open question because no spacecraft has been put in such a situation before. “And that’s exactly what our spacecraft Juno does”, Bolton said. Scientists fear it could contaminate Jupiter’s moon Europa, one of the solar system’s most hospitable spots for living creatures and a potential target for another NASA mission. On the evening of July 4, Juno will fire its main engine for 35 minutes, placing it into a polar orbit around the gas giant. We designed an orbit around Jupiter that minimizes exposure to Jupiter’s harsh radiation environment.

The source of potential trouble can be found inside Jupiter itself.

What can gravity and magnetic fields tell us about the insides of Jupiter?