Later on Monday, NASA will perform what could fuel some of the most exciting astronomical science in years to come - put spacecraft Juno into orbit around Jupiter.
Juno has been space travelling for five years to reach the solar system's largest planet. The manoeuvre, dubbed Jupiter Orbit Insertion, is scheduled to be performed at 8.18 p.m. PDT when NASA will fire Juno's main engine and plunge it into the gas giant's orbit. Juno is about 540 million miles away from Earth but has travelled 1,740 million miles. With its solar powered cells, the basketball court-sized spacecraft can do about 165,000 miles per hour!
According to CNN, Juno will orbit Jupiter 37 times over 20 months and will be about 2,600 miles from the planet's clouds at its closest pass.
High hopes riding on Juno include the prospects of revealing information about solar system formation, Jupiter's constitution beneath its dense clouds that even the most powerful telescopes cannot peer through and search for water in its atmosphere, among other things. Through seven instruments onboard, researchers hope to know it all.
"We are ready," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno in a press release. "The science team is incredibly excited to be arriving at Jupiter. The engineers and mission controllers are performing at an Olympic level getting Juno successfully into orbit."
The mission has already achieved many firsts, including becoming the first solar-powered aircraft to have gone this far from Earth. It will also be the first probe to orbit a planet pole-to-pole as it evades Jupiter's deadly radiation and is expected to prove never-before-seen glimpses at the planet. The mission will end in 2018 when the basketball-sized spacecraft crashes into Jupiter.
