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| An artist’s depiction of Juno approaching Jupiter. Picture credit: NASA |
Juno is not the first spacecraft to enter orbit around Jupiter. That honor goes to the aptly named Galileo spacecraft, which entered Jovian orbit in the year 1995. It found an intense radiation belt above the clouds of Jupiter and was also responsible for providing the first evidences that Europa may contain an ocean of liquid water under its surface, thereby alleviating Europa to a special status among the moons found in our Solar System!
So, why is the Juno spacecraft being sent there? There were numerous questions posed by the Galileo mission. Juno’s huge list of tasks include:
- to determine the amount of water found in the Jovian atmosphere, thus determining if the current theory about the formation of Jupiter is correct
- to map Jupiter’s magnetic and gravitational fields in order to deduce its internal composition
- explore the giant aurorae that occur in the poles of the planet, which is a direct consequence of its huge magnetic field, whose tail extends to the orbit of Saturn
Juno is scheduled to orbit Jupiter for the next two years, and will be hoping to prove some of our theories regarding the most massive planet in our Solar System.
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