THEY DID IT: NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Successfully Enters Jupiter’s Orbit

YEWWWWWWW.

Nasa‘s Juno spacecraft has navigated an extremely treacherous 35-minute burn and fallen into orbit around Jupiter.



Juno – a solar-powered spacecraft about the size of a basketball court – has spent five years and travelled 1.8 billion miles to get to this point. Its purpose? To observe Jupiter from underneath its cloud cover and “understand the recipe for how you make a solar system,” says Scott Bolton, Juno’s lead investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.



The 35-minute burn was the final and most nail-biting stage of the entire five years, Juno had to switch off all but the most essential equipment, turn away from the sun, and slow down to 209,214 km/h. In order to avoid the worst of the radiation, it had to navigate a route full of dust and rocks, flying closer to Jupiter than any spacecraft before it.



Jupiter was the first planet in our solar system, forming from an enormous gas cloud some 4.5 billion years ago. The leftover material became the remaining planets, asteroids, and comets, but Jupiter was the first – a giant gas planet 300 times bigger than Earth.

Photo: Twitter / @NASAJuno.

More Stuff From PEDESTRIAN.TV