NASA launches Juno spacecraft to Jupiter

[News_Editor]

NASA launches Juno spacecraft to Jupiter

2011-08-06 08:50:48 GMT+7 (ICT)

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA (BNO NEWS) – NASA's solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 12.25 p.m. local time Friday to begin a five-year journey to Jupiter.

Juno's principal goal is to reveal the origin and evolution of Jupiter. But as the archetype of giant gas planets, Jupiter can also provide critical knowledge for understanding the origin of our solar system and learn more about planetary systems around other stars.

"Today, with the launch of the Juno spacecraft, NASA began a journey to yet another new frontier," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "The future of exploration includes cutting-edge science like this to help us better understand our solar system and an ever-increasing array of challenging destinations."

Juno was launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 551 rocket, the most powerful Atlas rocket in NASA's inventory. Mission controllers now await telemetry from the spacecraft indicating it has achieved its proper orientation, and that its massive solar arrays, the biggest on any NASA deep-space probe, have deployed and are generating power.

"We are on our way, and early indications show we are on our planned trajectory," said Jan Chodas, Juno project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Juno will cover the distance from Earth to the moon, about 250,000 miles, in less than one day's time. But it will take another five years and 1,740 million miles (2800 million kilometers) to complete the journey to Jupiter.

The spacecraft will orbit the planet's poles 33 times and use its collection of eight science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant's obscuring cloud cover to learn more about its origins, structure, atmosphere, and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.

Juno's name comes from a Greek and Roman myth in which god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature.

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in our solar system. It is by far the oldest planet and contains more material than all the other planets, asteroids and comets combined. Its composition resembles a star's, and if it had been about 80 times more massive, the planet could have become a star instead. With four large moons and many smaller moons, Jupiter forms its own miniature solar system.

Jupiter has been explored on several occasions. The most recent probe to visit Jupiter was the Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft in late February 2007. The probe used Jupiter's gravity to increase its speed.

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