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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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—
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Online:
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NASA: “http://www.nasa.gov/juno” target=
“-blank”>http://www.nasa.gov/juno
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Southwest Research Institute: “text-decoration: none; color: #000066;” href=
“http://missionjuno.swri.edu/” target=
“-blank”>http://missionjuno.swri.edu
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