The Juno spacecraft will soon be on its way to Jupiter on a mission to look deep beneath the planet's swirling curtain of clouds to find out what lies beneath. The answer might confirm theories about how the solar system formed, or it may change everything we thought we knew.
"The special thing about Juno is we're really looking at one of the first steps, the earliest time in our solar system's history," said Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for the Juno mission. "Right after the sun formed, what happened that allowed the planets to form and why are the planets a slightly different composition than the sun?"
Starting the 4-ton spacecraft on its five-year journey to the largest planet in the solar system is the job of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V equipped with five solid-fueled boosters. Even with that much power, Juno will still require a flyby of Earth to get up enough energy to swing out to Jupiter. With three 34-foot-long solar arrays and a high-gain antenna in the middle, the spacecraft is reminiscent of a windmill. It even spins slowly as it goes through its mission. Those arrays will be the sole power source for Juno as it conducts its mission, a first for a spacecraft headed beyond the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
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