August 2, 2011 - The NASA Juno spacecraft is set to launch off on its trip to planet Jupiter this Friday to see what the gas giant can reveal up close.
The space probe is scheduled to blast off at 11:34 a.m. ET from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The weather forecast is showing a 70 percent chance for good weather, NASA officials claim.
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The Juno mission spacecraft will take five years to complete the 400-million-mile solar-powered trip to Jupiter, and will be the first probe visit to the gas giant since 2007. It is also the first Jupiter mission to be powered by the sun.
Astronomers are hoping that the mission will help them gain understanding on the solar system's beginnings and also how Jupiter formed out of the gas and dust left over from the sun.
Out of the eight instruments carried on Juno, one of them is a color camera that will be taking close-up color images of Jupiter as it sails just 31,000 miles over the gas giant's cloud tops. The spacecraft will fly around Jupiter in a polar orbit, completing mapping the planet in 33 orbits during its one-year mission.
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The interior of Jupiter's atmosphere and aurora will also be studied by Juno, as well as the dynamo powering the giant planet's fierce magnetic field.
"Mapping Jupiter's magnetic field is one of the very few ways available to learn about Jupiter's deep internal structure," said Steven Levin, Juno's project scientists of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., "That's because Jupiter's atmosphere is compressed so much by its powerful gravity field that it becomes impenetrable to most sensing techniques."
Levin added that, "Jupiter may be the best place in the solar system to study how planetary magnetic fields are generated."
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The magnetometers on Juno are so precise, they should be able to detect magnetic field slow time variations in Jupiter.
"If Jupiter has these variations, measuring them will let us visualize for the first time how the planet's dynamo works." says NASA Goddard's Jack Connerney, Juno's deputy principal investigator and head of the magnetometer team, "And that will give us a new understanding of the dynamos of other planets, both here in our solar system and beyond."
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To learn more about the Juno mission visit the mission's webpage over at NASA.
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