{"id":15394,"date":"2016-07-06T00:26:23","date_gmt":"2016-07-05T16:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/juno-spacecraft-braves-the-unknown-at-jupiter-to-enter-orbit\/"},"modified":"2016-07-06T00:26:23","modified_gmt":"2016-07-05T16:26:23","slug":"juno-spacecraft-braves-the-unknown-at-jupiter-to-enter-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/juno-spacecraft-braves-the-unknown-at-jupiter-to-enter-orbit\/","title":{"rendered":"Juno spacecraft braves the unknown at Jupiter to enter orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"NASA's
NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft, spinning once every 12 seconds for stability, fired its main engine for more than 35 minutes Monday to brake into orbit around Jupiter. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Setting up post at the king of planets, NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft fired its main engine for 35 minutes Monday, steering into orbit around Jupiter to peer inside the gas giant and give scientists a better idea of how the solar system took shape 4.6 billion years ago.<\/p>\n

Spinning on its axis once every 12 seconds, the probe\u2019s British-built rocket thruster ignited and slowed down Juno just enough to be snared by Jupiter\u2019s strong gravity field into a looping, 53-day-long orbit.<\/p>\n

Confirmation of the burn\u2019s successful conclusion reached Earth at 11:53 p.m. EDT (0353 GMT) via a radio tone broadcast by Juno, prompting applause and smiles inside the control room at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll stations\u2026 we have the tone for burn cutoff on delta-v,\u201d a ground controller said over a radio loop. \u201cWelcome to Jupiter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Powered by three solar panels arranged in a propeller-like pattern around Juno\u2019s main body, the Jupiter orbiter wrapped up a five-year, 1.7-billion-mile (2.8-billion-kilometer) trip with Monday\u2019s automated rendezvous with the solar system\u2019s biggest planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cTonight, through tones, Juno sang to us, and it was a song of perfection,\u201d said Rick Nybakken, Juno\u2019s project manager at JPL. \u201cAfter a 1.7-billion-mile journey, we hit our burn target within one second.\u201d<\/p>\n

The record-setting journey made Juno the farthest spacecraft from the sun to ever rely on solar power, and Monday\u2019s maneuver made the $1.1 billion mission the second to ever orbit Jupiter.<\/p>\n

Built by Lockheed Martin, Juno braved harsh radiation and dodged tiny particles of ice and dust from Jupiter\u2019s thin rings on its approach Monday, speeding over the planet\u2019s north pole and flying within 2,900 miles (4,667 kilometers) of the gaseous world\u2019s churning cloud tops, closer than any previous mission not on a trajectory to plunge into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

With Jupiter\u2019s gravity tugging it in, the spacecraft became one of the fastest space probes in history Monday, topping out at 130,000 mph, or more than 36 miles per second (58 kilometers per second), during the arrival sequence.<\/p>\n

The unknowns going into Juno\u2019s Fourth of July encounter with Jupiter gave many scientists caution, and mission managers highlighted the risks ahead of the spacecraft\u2019s date with destiny.<\/p>\n

But Juno performed like a champ Monday, according to initial data radioed back to Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just did the hardest thing NASA\u2019s ever done! That\u2019s my claim,\u201d shouted Scott Bolton, Juno\u2019s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, in excitement moments after the spacecraft\u2019s was verified in orbit.<\/p>\n

\"Members
Members of the Juno team celebrate after confirming the spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter on Monday. Credit: NASA\/Aubrey Gemignani<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bolton leads an international science team seeking to use Juno\u2019s instruments to peel back the layers on Jupiter, revealing the dynamics of its deep atmosphere and the structure of its central core for the first time.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow the fun begins \u2014 the science,\u201d Bolton said.<\/p>\n

Named for the wife of Jupiter in Roman mythology, a figure who could see through the cloak of clouds kept by the chief deity, Juno will reveal the gaseous world\u2019s poles in detail for the first time, peer beneath Jupiter\u2019s clouds with a microwave radiometer, and search for evidence of a solid core.<\/p>\n

Earlier missions left open questions about the inner workings of Jupiter, and instead focused on taking pictures and surveying the planet\u2019s many moons.<\/p>\n

Steven Levin, Juno\u2019s project scientist at JPL, said the most important measurement the mission will collect, in his opinion, is the amount of water inside Jupiter.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust by measuring that one number, the amount of water inside Jupiter, we can learn a lot about how Jupiter formed, and that teaches us not just about Jupiter, but about the whole solar system,\u201d Levin said.<\/p>\n

Leading theories hold that Jupiter formed after the sun, but before the rest of the worlds in the solar system, so learning about the early history of Jupiter is a bridge to learning how the rest of the planets were born.<\/p>\n

A suite of sensors on Juno will also study the origin of Jupiter\u2019s intense magnetic field and auroras. Scientists will use the data to infer information about the planet\u2019s deep interior and measure the environment around Jupiter.<\/p>\n

\u201cOddly enough, Jupiter\u2019s interior is quite a mystery to us, and that\u2019s ironic because it\u2019s made up of two of the simplest and and most abundant elements in universe, and those are hydrogen and helium,\u201d said Jack Connerney, Juno\u2019s deputy principal investigator and head of the magnetometer team at Goddard Space Flight Center. \u201cBut the problem is it\u2019s under such great pressure in that environment that it behaves in very mysterious ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole univerise is almost all hydrogen and helium,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cBut when we look closely at the composition of Jupiter, we learn that it has an enrichment of what scientists call heavy elements \u2014 all the elements beyond helium in mass, so the carbon, the nitrogen, the sulfur, the noble gases \u2014 Jupiter is enriched with these elements compared to the sun. We don\u2019t know exactly how that happened, but we know it\u2019s really important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jupiter has a magnetic field 20,000 times more powerful than Earth\u2019s, Connerney said, trapping high-energy electrons along magnetic field lines and giving the planet the most hazardous environment in the solar system other than the sun.<\/p>\n

\u201cJupiter is a planet on steroids,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cEverything about it is extreme.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has more than twice the mass of all the other matter in the solar system besides the sun. Jupiter has a diameter of 86,881 miles (139,822 kilometers) and is 318 times more massive than Earth, containing 1,321 times the volume of our home planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you go to study Jupiter and learn about how it formed, what you\u2019re really learning about is the history of those volatiles, those elements that eventually made us,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cWe\u2019re learning about what state and how they might have been distributed early in the solar system, which will fold into models about how you not only make Jupiter, but how you eventually make the other planets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft, spinning once every 12 seconds for stability, fired its main engine for more than 35 minutes Monday to brake into orbit around Jupiter. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech Setting up post at the king of planets, NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft fired its main engine for 35 minutes Monday, steering into orbit around Jupiter to peer inside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1183,1929,1606,472,1561,2612],"class_list":["post-15394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-jet-propulsion-laboratory","tag-juno","tag-jupiter","tag-lockheed-martin","tag-planetary-science","tag-swri"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}