Nasa launches Juno mission to Jupiter
The US space agency on Friday launched an unmanned spacecraft Juno on a five-year journey toward Jupiter for clues on how the gas giant and other planets in our solar system were formed.
“Ignition and liftoff on the Atlas V with Juno on a trek to Jupiter, a planetary piece of the puzzle on the beginning of our solar system,” said a Nasa television commentator as the satellite observatory launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida atop an Atlas V rocket at 12.25 pm.
Just under an hour after launch, Juno “will separate from the Centaur upper stage of its Atlas V rocket. At this point, Jupiter will be five years and 1,740 million miles away,” the US space agency said.
Once it arrives in July 2016, the spacecraft will orbit the poles of the gas giant, which has more than twice the mass of all planets in the solar system combined and is believed to be the first planet that took shape around the Sun.
The $1.1 billion mission aims for 30 orbits over a period of one year. Juno aims to get closer to Jupiter than any other Nasa spacecraft and will be the first to undertake a polar orbit of the planet, said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator and scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
“If we want to go back in time and understand where we came from and how the planets were made, Jupiter holds this secret,” he said.
In 1989, Nasa launched Galileo, an orbiter and probe that entered the planet’s orbit in 1995 and plunged into Jupiter in 2003, ending its life. Other Nasa spacecraft — including Voyager 1 and 2, Ulysses and New Horizons — have done flybys of the fifth planet from the sun.
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