NASA Spacecraft Nears Jupiter Rendezvous
BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- The night of July 4, a spacecraft flying faster than any skyrocket will rendezvous with the planet Jupiter.
It will try to unlock the secrets of the solar system's first and largest planet, WJZ's Alex DeMetrick reports.
Five years ago, the Juno spacecraft left Earth on a journey nearly 2 billion miles long.
Traveling 40 miles per second, it will fire its engine to slow down enough to enter a large looping orbit over Jupiter's north and south poles.
"What Juno's really about is learning about the recipe for how solar systems are made," according to Scott Bolton, who works on the Juno mission for NASA.
Instruments will probe beneath the system's first planet, looking for the recipe's ingredients.
"In particular, the oxygen compositions and the water there," says Mike Purucker, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
"That will tell us something about the origins of the planet."
Something that's vastly different about Jupiter is its gigantic magnetic field.
"It's 20,000 times the size of Earth's magnetic field," according to Dave Sheppard, also of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
"It's really enormous."
If it were visible, it would shine as bright as the full moon. But because it can't be seen, instruments built at the Goddard Center will study it from Juno.
"Jupiter is really the key to understand our solar system, and so to understand how Jupiter formed will really help us understand how solar system formed and understand about how our Earth was formed," according to Sheppard. "Where we came from."
Juno will spend 18 months trying to unlock Jupiter's secrets, before gravity pulls it into a fatal embrace.
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