After a 5 Year/2 Billion mile trip it will arrive just a few hours from now Probably some spectacular pictures coming in next few weeks. Pix and video within. Giant spacecraft nears Jupiter By Amanda Barnett, CNN - July 4, 2016 http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/04/health/juno-jupiter/ It's been speeding toward Jupiter for nearly five years. Now -- can it slow down? On Monday, NASA's Juno spacecraft -- a spinning, robotic probe as wide as a basketball court -- will perform what the space agency calls a 35-minute long "suspenseful" maneuver that will allow it to be pulled into orbit around Jupiter. Basically, mission managers will hit the brakes, and they'll hit them hard. They plan to fire Juno's main engine for 35 minutes starting at 8:18 p.m. PT (11:19 p.m. ET). That should slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second) and allow it to be pulled into orbit around Jupiter. "We are ready," said Scott Bolton, the mission's principal investigator. "The science team is incredibly excited to be arriving at Jupiter," he said in a NASA press release. Juno will circle Jupiter 37 times over 20 months, diving down to about 2,600 miles (4,100 kilometers) above the planet's dense clouds. "Some of the challenges are we are going into the most treacherous place in the entire solar system, radiation fields that are really intense," Juno Project Manager Rick Nybakken told CNN's Paul Vercammen. Juno has seven science instruments designed to help scientists figure out how Jupiter formed and evolved. The planet is the most massive in our solar system -- a huge ball of gas 11 times wider than Earth. Researchers think it was the first planet to form and that it holds clues to how the solar system evolved. "One of the primary goals of Juno is to learn the recipe for solar systems," Bolton said at a news conference. "How do you make the solar system? How do you make the planets in our solar system?" Spacecraft have been to Jupiter before, but scientists still are puzzled by the gas giant. What's going on under Jupiter's dense clouds? Does it have a solid core? How much water is in its atmosphere? And how deep are those colorful bands and that mysterious giant red spot? "Jupiter looks a lot like the sun," Bolton said. But it has much more than the sun, and that's really important. "The stuff that Jupiter has more of is what we're all made out of," he said. "It's what the Earth is made out of. It's what life comes from." Juno will help solve the mysteries of Jupiter by looking at its interior. The spacecraft will orbit the poles and try to dodge the planet's most hazardous radiation belts. To protect the spacecraft from the radiation, Juno has a shielded electronics vault. Juno also has a color camera and a three LEGO crew members (yes, LEGOs). The camera is called JunoCam and NASA says it will take "spectacular close-up, color images" of Jupiter. NASA is asking the public to help decide where to point the camera. [........]
Bingo! Success: NASA’s Juno probe enters orbit around Jupiter By Rachel Feltman July 5 at 1:30 AM https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-tumbles-into-a-dangerous-dance-with-jupiter/ NASA scientists on Monday night confirmed that Juno, a football-field-sized spacecraft designed to unlock some of the secrets of our solar system, successfully entered an orbit around Jupiter, the largest, oldest planet in our solar system, and one with some of the most powerful radiation scientists have ever seen. Juno completed a 35-minute engine burn that slowed the spacecraft so Jupiter’s gravitational pull could sweep it into an optimal orbit. After traveling billions of miles, Juno hurtled into an area of space just a few miles wide, aiming to hit that target within the span of a few seconds. So yeah, that’s a little tough. At 10:30 p.m. Eastern time, NASA began broadcasting from mission control to document the Juno spacecraft’s insertion into an orbit around Jupiter. Although the video was live, the report wasn’t exactly in real time. The spacecraft’s signals take 48 minutes to travel 534 million miles to the Deep Space Network Antenna, in Goldstone, Calif. At 11:18 p.m., the team announced that an engine burn designed to help the robot slip into an optimal orbit had started. Twenty minutes later, the team confirmed that the engine had burned long enough to enter some kind of orbit. But they needed to wait for the entire burn to finish to be sure that they were in the cozy orbit that’s expected to last 53 days. That signal arrived just a few minutes before midnight. Cheers broke out across the mission’s two control centers, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California and at the Lockheed Martin control room in Colorado. [.......]+
NASA's Juno poised to begin transmitting close-up views of Jupiter Michael Kofsky, 4:46 p.m. EDT July 5, 2016 http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/07/05/nasas-juno-probe-enters-jupiters-orbit/86697540/ PASADENA, Calif. NASAs Juno spacecraft, now skimming the cloud tops of Jupiter, is poised to begin transmitting close-up views of the gas giant before a planned crash-landing into the fifth planet in early 2018. Among the mysteries that scientists hope to solve over: Does Jupiter, dubbed "the most dominant object in the solar system," have a solid core? The $1.1 billion spacecraft safely entered Jupiters orbit early Tuesday after completing a five-year journey across 1.8 billion miles of deep space. It began firing its main engines at 8:18 pm local time Monday to slow itself down so it could be captured by Jupiters gravity. Thirty-five minutes later, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mission Control received confirmation: Juno's attempt to throw itself into orbit had been successful. - "All stations on Juno co-ord, we have the tone for burn cut-off on Delta B," Juno Mission Control announced, followed by: "Roger Juno, welcome to Jupiter." In coming days, Juno will turn its instruments back on, but the real work won't begin until late August, when the spacecraft swings in closer, the Associated Press reported. Plans call for Juno to swoop within 3,000 miles of Jupiter's clouds closer than previous missions to map the planet's gravity and magnetic fields in order to learn about the interior makeup. If we want to understand how planets form and how solar systems form, we really have to start with Jupiter, said Steve Levin, a Juno project scientist. Juno will take a series of risky dives beneath Jupiters intense radiation belts where it will study the gas giant from as close as 2,600 miles over the planet's cloud tops. Galileo, the last mission to the gas giant that ended in 2003, spent most of its mission five times farther away than Juno will get. Scientists warned that the project was risky and might not succeed. Juno will be the first spacecraft to study Jupiter from such a close distance. [.......]
Sound and Fury on Jupiter... Jupiter's Great Red Spot 'roars with heat' Wed, 27 Jul 2016 - Jupiter's giant storm is somehow heating the planet's upper atmosphere - possibly by means of sound waves - astronomers discover.
Questions, questions - so many questions! I wonder if they'll ever be answered? Maybe they will if the 'research funding' keeps flooding in to the various 'space agencies' coffers. Or not!! Jesus how astonishingly gullible some adults are to actually believe this drivel.
I noticed that too! 'roars with heat' is such a dynamic description - anything to hype it up a bit, and impress the believers? Today's other big story is Philae tweeting 'Goodbye' - "The landers Twitter account, [MENTION=58325]Phil[/MENTION]ae2014, has amassed nearly 448,000 followers and on 26 July, it sent out a farewell message. Its time for me to say goodbye. Tomorrow, the unit on [MENTION=63393]ESA[/MENTION]_Rosetta for communication with me will be switched off forever... '448,000 followers' -
Looks like Jupiter got its own version of Las Vegas... Second 'Great Spot' Found at Jupiter, Cold and High Up April 11, 2017 — Another "Great Spot" has been found at Jupiter, this one cold and high up.
Jupiter's poles got monstrous cyclones... Monstrous cyclones churning over Jupiter's poles May 25, 2017 — Monstrous cyclones are churning over Jupiter's poles, until now a largely unexplored region that is more turbulent than scientists expected.
