JUNO mission

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I have been recently very interested in mission JUNO. It is a NASA/JPL mission and was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 5th of August 2011. It was launched aboard the Atlas V552 rocket and placed into the orbit. It took 2 years cruising the inner solar system before it took direction to Jupiter, using Earth's gravity to help to propel itself into the correct direction. Actually the name of the mission JUNO comes from the Greek and Roman mythology.

JUNO is the second spacecraft to orbit Jupiter after the Galileo mission, orbiting 1995 to 2003. Unlike the previous mission JUNO uses solar panels instead of the radioisotope thermoelectric generators used by previous missions.

The main goal of the mission is to study the origin and the evolution of Jupiter. It arrived to Jupiter in July 2016. Right now JUNO is orbiting around Jupiter.

Credit NASA/JPL
JUNO mission is looking for how much water is in the Jupiter's atmosphere, what is the composition of the atmosphere and motion of the clouds. Another goal is to map Jupiter's magnetic and gravity fields, and looking into Jupiter's magnificent auroras. Jupiter has very bright and persistent auroras around both poles, which is different from the Earth's auroras, which depend on the solar activity. Of course the intensity of Jupiter's auroras varies from day to day.

The main reason of the JUNO mission that we have plenty of unanswered question about the planet. If we better understand Jupiter, we can better understand how our solar system was formed.

Credit NASA/JPL
Jupiter is gas-giant planet, having more than twice the mass of all the planets in the solar system combined. Jupiter is mainly composed of hydrogen. And the radius is about 1/10 the radius of the Sun and the magnetic field is about 14 times stronger than Earth's magnetic field, about 0.4mT to 1.4mT.

Jupiter has 69 known satellites. The four largest moons are called Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. All of them belong to the largest moons in the solar system.

But let's come to the Jupiter next time :-).

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