By 03:54 GMT on Tuesday, the solar-powered probe was incorporated into the orbit of Jupiter, ending a mission that began in August 2011 and seeks to clear many questions about the largest planet in the solar system, so huge that in he could fit Earth more than a thousand times.
“This is the most difficult feat that has never gotten NASA,” said Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for the mission, the rest of his team in Pasadena (California) when the success of the maneuver entry into orbit was confirmed.
the ship, unmanned and the size of a basketball court, and made history in January by becoming the probe driven by solar energy in reaching more far into space, to about 793 million kilometers from the sun.
Over the next 20 months, the probe will give 37 laps to the orbit of Jupiter to help improve the understanding of the early stages of system solar, to reveal the origin and evolution of its biggest planet.
Juno is the first probe designed to operate in the heart of the radiation belts of Jupiter, the first to reach 2,575 kilometers from their clouds higher and will take images with higher resolution never seen the giant planet.
Now that you have completed the long and complicated maneuver of insertion into the orbit of Jupiter, the probe will approach the upper clouds planet every 14 days to finish the mission in February 2018, when it is scheduled to crash deliberately in the planet’s atmosphere and be destroyed.
This is the most ambitious project in Jupiter since the Galileo spacecraft NASA went into orbit in 1995 and remained there for eight years, which led to the discovery that the bright planet had strong winds and their rings were formed from dust particles arrivals from surrounding moons.
But Juno will orbit for the first time the poles of Jupiter, which Galileo did not and that will provide new answers to the mysteries on its core composition and magnetic field.
the American probe is also the first to observe what beneath the thick clouds of the planet, so that the mission is named after the goddess Juno, sister and wife of Jupiter, which according to Roman mythology, could see through the clouds.
according the US space agency (NASA), this mission will help understand “how giant planets and the role they played in the formation of the rest of the solar system formed.”
the giant planets, also called outer or gaseous, they are those that are located beyond the asteroid belt, ie, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Jupiter was probably the first of the planets formed around the Sun because it contains many of the same light from which is made the star, hydrogen and helium, according to NASA gases.
to be composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, Jupiter must have formed while there were many of these light gases around, it is ie when the solar system was young.
the mission of Juno has a total investment of 1,300 million dollars and is the second probe designed by NASA program “New Frontiers” after “New Horizons “which approached Pluto in July 2015 after nine and a half years of space journey.
Juno, the first probe to orbit from pole to pole an outer planet (which are beyond the belt asteroid), weighs 3,625 kilos in total and its main body measures 3.5 meters in height and diameter.
most of spacecraft that venture so far from the Sun need to use nuclear energy to continue but Juno is able to generate enough power with its three huge solar panels, nine meters long each.
with its scientific instruments, Juno will investigate the existence of a solid planetary core, examine the intense Jupiter’s magnetic field, measure the amount of ammonia in the deep atmosphere, and observe the auroras on the planet.
in addition, identify how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which will help determine which theory formation planet is correct or if necessary develop new theories.
the ship has three distinctive “crew”, a Lego figurines aluminum representing the Roman god Jupiter, his wife Juno and Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, discoverer of several of the moons of Jupiter with NASA wants to attract the attention of children to space, science and engineering.
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