Juno to Provide Window Into Jupiter

Juno to Provide Window Into Jupiter: "
Jupiter is a wild and exciting place. What used to be considered just a giant gas cloud hovering around the sun has turned out to be a dynamic, vibrant planet with horrific storms, planet-Earth-sized lightning discharges, and a terrible death grip on its moons. As our ability to examine the planet grows, the number of strange and unimagined Jovian features increases.

For example, we now know that Jupiter’s magnetic field charges up the moon Io like a battery. Io then blasts the gas giant with a electrical zap from 262 thousand miles away creating lightning that dashes through the Jovian clouds in bolts that are tens of thousands of miles long. We know that Jupiter’s magnetosphere is the largest object in the solar system, and that it puts an incredible strain on Jupiter’s moons, grinding some to dust while blowing the surface off of others.


We know what these things are. Now we’re going to try and find out the “how”.

NASA plans to launch the Juno spacecraft in August. It will be the first probe specifically designed to examine Jupiter’s amazing oddities.

The overall goal of the Juno mission is to help us understand how Jupiter was formed. Hovering 3,000 miles over the gas giant’s immense north pole, Juno will measure her gravitational fields, her magnetic fields, and attempt to monitor atmospheric conditions in the thousands of miles of hydrogen clouds that form the planet.

Oddly enough, Juno will also search for traces of water down there in the Jovian clouds. Jupiter is believed to have no solid surface – theory holds that the hydrogen eventually gets so dense that it turns to liquid metal. Scientists believe, however, that at least some of that hydrogen was delivered to Jupiter in the form of water, and that liquid water may yet exist somewhere within the Jovian atmosphere.

Juno brings an entirely new battery of instruments to examine and explore Jupiter as never before. With any luck, scientists will gain insight into how the gas giant formed and, possibly, a new understanding of how our solar system itself came to be.

You can read more about the Juno Mission at NASA’s Juno site, and more about Jupiter at Nine Planets.

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