A mission to Jupiter is a success this morning. NASA spacecraft Juno just arrived at the solar system’s largest planet and it is now orbiting the gas giant after a five-year journey.
- It has taken Juno five years to reach Jupiter
- Juno's 20-month mission is to study the gas giant
Even more exciting though is the information Juno is designed to send back to Earth.
NASA scientists were celebrating more than just our country’s independence Monday night. That’s because Juno has been soaring through our solar system for five years and has finally reached its destination late Monday night — Jupiter.
This amazing video captured by Juno shows how it looked as the spacecraft was approaching Jupiter.
Now that it’s arrived, Juno will be the key to studying Jupiter and revealing the unknown. A former NASA astronaut talked about what he hopes to discover.
"It will give us an idea of how much water or how much oxygen is involved in the composition of the planet. It's going to give us some clues as to whether or not it has a rocky core," Leroy Chiao said. Chiao was a commander and NASA science officer of the Expedition 10, where he lived on board the International Space Station for six months.
And NASA also intends to give some amazing pictures during the next 20 months of the mission and those images might appear on Juno's own Twitter page.
In fact, the weeks leading up to the encounter, Juno snapped pictures of the giant planet and its four inner moons dancing around it. Scientists were surprised to see Jupiter's second-largest moon, Callisto, appearing dimmer than expected.
The spacecraft's camera and other instruments were switched off for arrival, so there weren't any pictures at that key moment. Scientists have promised close-up views of the planet when Juno skims the cloud tops during the 20-month, $1.1 billion mission managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Check out Juno's interactive program that allows people to see its mission in real time.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.