NASA celebrates July with arrival of Juno-Spacecraft at Planet Jupiter by JAYNEZTOWN

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NASA celebrates July with arrival of Juno-Spacecraft at Planet Jupiter

POSTED BY: JAYNEZTOWN
UPDATED: Sunday, July 3, 2016 00:59
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Saturday, July 2, 2016 9:35 PM

NASA will reach Jupiter on July 4

Over the past few weeks, Jupiter’s gravity has been reeling Juno in, accelerating the spacecraft to breakneck speeds. By the time it arrives, Juno will be one of the fastest human-made objects in history, moving approximately 260,000 kilometers per hour (165,000 mph) relative to the Earth. That’s roughly ten times the top speed of the Space Shuttle.

Juno is the furthest solar powered mission ever conceived, built to run on the sun in an environment 25 times dimmer than the Earth. Even with state-of-the-art solar technology and energy-efficient electronics, the spacecraft needs to catch a lot of sunlight. Spanning 20 meters (66 feet), its three solar arrays contain approximately 18,000 solar cells in all.

Unlike the sun, though, Jupiter is enriched with heavier elements like carbon and nitrogen—and scientists don’t know how it got that way. Juno will determine whether Jupiter is also enriched with water (the Galileo mission didn’t detect any, but many believe it to have been an unlucky sample), and whether it has a rocky core. If the majority of Jupiter isn’t water depleted, then heavy elements probably arrived at the planet by way of ice—at some point, the planet got bombarded by a bunch of carbon-loaded space snowballs. But if Jupiter does have a rocky core of heavy elements, that must mean that those rocky substances formed before Jupiter did, maybe even before the sun.

NASA's Juno spacecraft is going closer to the massive and mysterious planet Jupiter than any spacecraft has ever gone.

The ship has flown more than 1.7 billion miles over five years, and on Thursday Juno began executing the sequence of commands that will take it right to Jupiter's clouds.

Jupiter arrival

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