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Juno Joins Jupiter
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Artist’s concept of the Juno spacecraft at Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Last night, NASA’s Juno probe successfully performed the necessary braking maneuver to put it in orbit around Jupiter. Juno was launched back in the summer of 2011 and has traveled 1.7 billion miles (including a flyby of Earth to pick up speed) to get to Jupiter.
The plan is for the probe to hang out around Jupiter’s poles and peek inside the planet and try to figure out what’s going on. (See, in Roman mythology, Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide what he was doing. His wife Juno was able to look through the veil to see what was going on.) Specifically, the probe will study Jupiter’s gravity field, magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere. And it will try to determine if the gigantic swirling ball of gas has a rocky core at the middle.
Unlike most other space probes, this one has a crew. Well, kinda. There are three LEGO men who made the trip. There are figures representing the Roman god Jupiter, his wife Juno, and Galileo Galilei. However, LEGO purists may be disappointed: to increase their durability, they are made of aluminum instead of plastic.
This is a preview from Tuesday morning’s The Daily Shot newsletter. Subscribe here free of charge.
Published in Science & Technology
What? I thought plastic would last millions of years in our landfills. Is this not true? It really degrades in just a few years?
Now that Juno’s around, I’m waiting for Jupiter to turn Io into a cow. That’d be cool.
Yes John, thanks for this quick lesson, and for every word you write.
But I’m with Pilli in not missing an opportunity for the snark. And don’t get me started on styrofoam! (A necessary ingredient of potting soil! And if it “lasts 500 years”, doesn’t that mean it’s amazingly stable and won’t interact with anything else, making it intensely eco-friendly? Gaaaah!! Okay, stop Bruce . . . )