What do we expect from Juno mission to Jupiter?

The Juno spacecraft has just entered the Jovian orbit after covering nearly 1.7 billion miles in the interplanetary space some five years after its launch in August 2011. In order to place itself safely in an orbit, the probe successfully reduced its astonishing speed of 165,000 per hour to about 1,200 miles per hour after it switched on its braking engine for 35 minutes on Monday.

A few days earlier, the titanium-armored probe had also passed, safe and sound, through the giant’s immense offensive magnetic field, known as magnetosphere, one of the most treacherous forces in our solar system, and beamed back the roars of the fuming giant, with a 49-minute communication lag time, back to the Earth.

We know Jupiter since antiquity when early astronomers began to write down their observations and speculations about the bright object in the night sky. In the past decades, however, the Pioneer 10 and 11, which flew past of the Jupiter in the solar system, in 1973 and 1974, increased our knowledge of the planet compared to what we knew about it in ancient times.

But it was Galileo spacecraft, launched in 1989, which dramatically helped us to know the giant when it entered into the Jupiter’s orbit in 1995 for the first time and sent a probe, again for the first time, unto the planet’s turbulent atmosphere to investigate its composition.

What is significant, then, to Juno mission, that made NASA to spend some $1.1 billion on yet another Jupiter-bound mission? What else do we need to know about the largest planet in the Sun’s family?

Juno, unlike Galileo, entered an orbit which passes over the Jupiter’s poles, a vertical one, to peek through, for the first time, those unexplored regions, investigating their climate and composition and searching for possible traces of water, life’s most vital ingredient.

The Jovian magnetic field is the most powerful among other planets in the Solar System. But without having a solid core, how does Jupiter’s dynamo action make such an immense magnetic field? We have studied the Earth’s magnetic field extensively during the past decades. But even though we can map our planet’s field we cannot peer though it’s rocky crust to witness its dynamo process in action. If Juno can get close enough, it can actually take readings of the beast’s massive engine directly.

During the next 20 months, the small spacecraft will complete 37 orbits around the fast-rotating giant and will get closer to it than any man-made object before it, to further study Jupiter and the path it covered through its evolution during the past 4.5 billion years. Juno will particularly study the mysterious red spot on the face of the monster, which is believed to be a gigantic storm, much bigger than the Earth in diameter.

The solar-powered Juno will end its mission and sink into oblivion after going into a suicide dive in the beast’s jaws in February 2018.

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