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NASA spacecraft heads on 5-year trip to Jupiter

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A sun-powered robotic explorer named

Juno is rocketing toward Jupiter on a fresh quest to discover the

secret recipe for making planets.

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Hundreds of scientists and their families and friends cheered and

yelled “Go Juno!” as the unmanned Atlas rocket blasted into a clear

midday sky Friday. It will take five years to reach Jupiter, the

solar system’s most massive and ancient planet.

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“It’s fantastic!” said Fran Bagenal, a planetary scientist at the

University of Colorado at Boulder, who is part of the NASA project

and watched from just four miles away. “Just great to see the thing

lift off.”

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Within an hour, Juno hurtled out of Earth’s orbit at 22,000 mph on

a roundabout course for Jupiter. It was expected to whip past the

orbit of the moon in half a day, or early Saturday

morning.

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It is the first step in Juno’s 1.7 billion-mile voyage to the gas

giant Jupiter, just two planets away but altogether different from

Earth and next-door neighbor Mars.

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Juno is solar powered, a first for a spacecraft meant to roam so

far from the sun. It has three huge solar panels that were folded

for launch. Early indications were that they popped open an hour

into the flight exactly as planned, each one stretching as long and

wide as a tractor-trailer. Previous spacecraft to the outer planets

have relied on nuclear energy.

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With Juno, scientists hope to answer some of the most fundamental

questions of our solar system.

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“How Jupiter formed. How it evolved. What really happened early in

the solar system that eventually led to all of us,” said Juno’s

chief investigator Scott Bolton, an astrophysicist at Southwest

Research Institute in San Antonio.

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Bolton said Jupiter is like a time capsule. It got most of the

leftovers from the sun’s creation nearly 5 billion years ago –

hence the planet’s immense size – and its enormous gravity field

has enabled it to hold onto that original material.

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Jupiter is so big it could contain everything in the solar system,

minus the sun, and still be twice as massive. Astronomers say it

probably was the first planet in the solar system to

form.

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Juno will venture much closer to Jupiter than any of the eight

spacecraft that have visited Jupiter since the 1970s, most of them

just passing by. Juno represents the next step, Bolton

said.

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“We look deeper. We go much closer. We’re going over the poles. So

we’re doing a lot of new things that have never been done, and

we’re going to get all this brand-new information,” Bolton

said.

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The $1.1 billion mission – which will end with Juno taking a fatal

plunge into Jupiter in 2017 – kicks off a flurry of astronomy

missions by NASA.

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Next up is Grail, twin spacecraft that will be launched next month

and go into orbit around Earth’s moon. Then comes Curiosity, a

six-wheeled, jeep-size rover that will blast off for Mars at the

end of November in search of environments conducive to

life.

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Unlike many other NASA missions, this one came in on cost and on

time. It’s relatively inexpensive; the Cassini probe launched in

1997 to Saturn, by way of Jupiter, cost $3.4 billion. The tab for

the next Mars rover: $2.5 billion.

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Juno’s liftoff appeared to create more buzz than usual, given the

hiatus in human launches from the United States – the space shuttle

program ended two weeks ago. NASA’s long-term goal is to send

astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the

mid-2030s.

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There are a few special passengers aboard Juno, though.

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Attached to the probe are three little Lego figures specially made

of space-grade aluminum. They represent the Italian physicist

Galileo, who discovered Jupiter’s four biggest moons; the Roman god

Jupiter; and his wife Juno, for whom the spacecraft is

named.

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If all goes well, Juno will go into orbit around Jupiter’s poles –

a first – on July 4, 2016.

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The oblong orbit will bring Juno within 3,100 miles of the

cloudtops and right over the most powerful auroras in the solar

system. In fact, that’s how the spacecraft got its name – Juno

peered through clouds to keep tabs on her husband,

Jupiter.

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Juno will circle the planet 33 times, each orbit lasting 11 days

for a grand total of one year.

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With each orbit, the spacecraft will pass over a different

longitude so that by mission’s end, “we’ve essentially dropped a

net around the planet with all of our measurements,” Bolton said.

That’s crucial for understanding Jupiter’s invisible gravity and

magnetic force fields, he noted.

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Radiation is so intense around Jupiter that Bolton and his team put

Juno’s most sensitive electronics inside a titanium vault – an

armored tank, as he calls it.

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Juno’s experiments also will attempt to ascertain the abundance of

water, and oxygen, in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and determine whether

the core of the planet is solid or gaseous.

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Juno bears nine instruments, including a wide-angle color camera,

JunoCam, that will beam back images that the public can turn into

photos.

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The spacecraft also bears a small Italian-supplied plaque honoring

Galileo. It shows his self-portrait, as well as his description of

observing Jupiter’s moons, in his own handwriting from

1610.

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Online:

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NASA:Ā 

“http://www.nasa.gov/juno” target=

“-blank”>http://www.nasa.gov/juno

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Southwest Research Institute:Ā 

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“http://missionjuno.swri.edu/” target=

“-blank”>http://missionjuno.swri.edu

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