Friday, July 15, 2016

NASA's Juno probe arrived at Jupiter one second late - damn!

Interesting fact of the day (well, 11 days ago actually): NASA's Juno spacecraft arrived at its orbit of the planet Jupiter all of 1 second late after a 5-year trip of 1.7 billion miles (2.7 billion kilometres).
Juno then successfully executed what is probably the single most important step of its five-year journey, when it fired its engines just enough, and for just the right length of time, to slow the craft down and put it into Jupiter's orbit around the sun, and to bring it into the planet's gravitational pull. Not bad, given that it takes signals from Earth 48 minutes to reach Juno (which at this point is over half a billion miles away) so that any manoeuvres have to be programmed with great accuracy ahead of time.
The probe, which was initially launched back in August 2011, will study the giant gas giant's composition, gravity field, magnetic field and polar magnetosphere, and might even teach us a thing or two  about how our solar system evolved in the first place.

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