Juno to view Jupiter's Cloud-tops Close Up

On July 4, NASA will fire, for 35 minutes, the main engine of its spacecraft Juno, a basketball court sized, solar powered spacecraft moving its orbit to within 2,900 miles of the cloud tops of our solar system’s largest planet - Jupiter.

The purposed burn will place it into a polar orbit around the gas giant. During the flybys of a series of 37 planned close approaches Juno will probe beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and study its auroras to learn more about the planet's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

To get more information, click HERE for the complete NASA article.

NASA Releases Juno Flyby of Earth Photos of the Earth Moon System.

During October of this year 2013) NASA's  Jupiter bound Juno spacecraft made a close pass of Earth to boost the craft's  speed by almost 9,000 miles-per-hour, captured with it's low-res camera never-before-seen view of the moon orbiting Earth.




Here is the NASA link for the flyby

In short thehe spacecraft, when it arrives in 2018 will be placed in a polar orbit .  There it will study Jupiter's composition, gravity field, magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere.

According to the wiki Juno will also search for clues about how it formed, including whether Jupiter has a rocky core, the amount of water present within the deep atmosphere, and how its mass is distributed.   Wikipedia URL

Mission to Jupiter, launching Aug. 5

Dan reminded me that NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter is due to launch Friday August 5. If you wish to catch the launch the launch window extends from 11:34 a.m. to 12:33 p.m. EDT.

From the article

• The primary goal of the mission is to understand the origin and evolution of the massive gas planet

Juno is due to reach Jupiter in 2016. The trip will cover an astounding 400-million-miles. Once there Juno will orbit the planet 33 times and come within 3,000 miles of the cloud tops.

Maine residents will get a kick out of this. From the article again:

• CU-Boulder senior Dinesh Costlow of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department is collaborating with the Juno science team by using computer models to simulate the trajectory of the spacecraft through all 33 individual orbits. Costlow now a senior at CU-Boulder is from Auburn, Maine.

Read complete article here

NASA preparing Juno probe to study Jupiter

From Cnet: NASA has announced that it is planning to launch a mission, entitled Juno, to conduct a large-scale survey of our solar system's biggest planet. The spacecraft is planned for an August 2011 launch on board an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It is expected to reach its destination, orbit around Jupiter, in 2016. The plan is for the spacecraft to orbit Jupiter 32 times over the course of a year at a distance of around 3,000 miles above the planet's cloud tops. What makes this mission truly unique is that this would be the first solar-powered spacecraft expected to be able to perform its duties so far from the sun. Jupiter is more than four times farther away from the sun as Earth, a total of around 400 million miles. NASA hopes the mission will discover or explore the existence of an ice-rock core. Plus Juno will also study the planet's strong magnetic field, and its aurora borealis.