When Juno successfully entered orbit around Jupiter on 4th July 2016, it was placed an orbit that took 53.5 Earth days to complete. During the 3rd orbit, which was scheduled to begin on 19th October 2016, a burn of the main engine was intended to move Juno into a 14 day science orbit. This new orbit […]
The Juno spacecraft is not the first to visit Jupiter – this honour goes to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft back in December of 1973. The planet has been visited by a total of eight spacecraft prior to the arrival of Juno in July of 2016. Out of these eight, only the Galileo spacecraft entered orbit, […]
The northern and southern lights of Jupiter are a vibrant and dynamic phenomena, generated by a complex array of mechanisms that create the most powerful aurora in the solar system. There are many aspects of the Jovian aurora which remain to be discovered – something Juno will reveal during it’s time at Jupiter – but […]
Wow! The Juno spacecraft did not disappoint! The images released after Juno’s first science perijove are absolutely stunning. The one that grabbed me was this one: Jupiter’s southern infrared aurora as observed by Juno JIRAM (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM) It is the first image released from the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), an instrument contributed by the […]
The Juno spacecraft is today 3 million km from Jupiter, and it has spent its time in the first of two capture orbits about the planet. These orbits take 53 days to complete and are followed by the main science phase with orbits about 14 days long. The capture orbit itself is designed to keep […]
Given that we don’t yet know whether a planetary core exists within Jupiter, much of our understanding of giant planet formation comes from a different line of investigation: the bulk composition of the planet. The composition of the atmosphere that we observe today results from a combination of many processes – chemistry initiated […]
Juno has just passed a major milestone in its first wide orbit around the giant planet, having passed by its apojove, the furtherest distance to Jupiter (8.1 million km). It will now fall back down the gravity well towards its next close encounter with the planet on August 27th. That completes the first of two […]
One of the largest remaining questions in understanding the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, the outmost layer of the atmosphere, is: ‘Why is this region so very hot?’. Out where Jupiter orbits the Sun, the sunlight is very faint, and cannot provide enough energy to produce the temperatures that we measure.We call this the ‘energy crisis’. […]
Dr. Leigh Fletcher discusses how Juno could revolutionise our understanding of the origins of Jupiter via gravitational mapping of its internal structure. The presence of Jupiter has had a profound influence on the architecture of our solar system, shaping the conditions that have led to the stable, habitable environment that exist here on Earth. […]
Water, water, everywhere. Dr. Leigh Fletcher appeared on this month’s episode of BBC Sky at Night to discuss Juno’s goals at Jupiter, and describes the importance of Jupiter’s water in this new post. If our ideas about the formation of giant planets stand up to the observational tests of the Juno […]
Recent Comments