Juno sets off on 1,740 million mile journey to unlock Jupiter’s secrets

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Artist's rendering of Juno orbiting Jupiter (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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Juno's trajectory, or flight path, from Earth to Jupiter (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Artist's rendering of Juno in orbit above Jupiter's north pole (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The Juno spacecraft (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Article Summary

Last Friday, NASA’s Juno spacecraft launched aboard an Atlas V-551 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida beginning its five-year, 1,740 million mile (2,800 million km) journey to our solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter. Juno is due to arrive at Jupiter in July 2016, after which it will orbit the gas giant planet’s poles 33 times over a period of about a year. The spacecraft’s collection of eight science instruments will probe beneath Jupiter’s obscuring cloud cover to reveal more about its origins, structure, atmosphere, and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.

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