New Spacecraft Enters Jupiter’s Orbit

Our solar system is still full of many mysteries, from questioning if there is water on Mars to trying to determine which planet or moon will sustain life. NASA continues to try and solve these mysteries with their latest mission, a probe around Jupiter that'll take close-up pictures and analyze its composition, to see how that data relates to Earth's origins.

The probe was launched in 2011, and finally reached its destination on July 4th, 2016. Its name is Juno, named after the Roman goddess who was Jupiter's wife, who could see through clouds and see her husbands true nature.

Juno is the only the second space craft to orbit Jupiter, the last one was Galileo, which was crashed into the atmosphere of Jupiter after 8 years in Jovian orbit, where it endured intense radiation damage to the equipment on board. It was crashed due to both the radiation damage, and to avoid further contamination of the local moons with local bacteria.

Juno has its own Twitter feed, which can be found here or by the tweets embedded below. Like most of NASA's twitter feeds, it can have a bit of a snarky attitude.

Juno is expected to start sending pictures back to Earth in coming days, but it also took a video as it approached its target last month, which can be found below. Further information from the mission overview, including images and videos can be found at NASA's website.