NASA Explains How the Juno Probe Got to Jupiter

We're going to Jupiter with this spacecraft.

It's going into the worst radiation field

in the solar system.

We think we're ready, but no one's ever done this before.

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Well, the most important thing you should know about Juno is

we are trying to understand, how did Jupiter form,

in order to understand, how did the solar system form?

Where do we come from?

If I want to know, how do I get to making the Earth,

I need to know, what is Jupiter made out of?

Jupiter is more than twice the mass

of all the other planets combined.

Juno will orbit closer to the planet

than any other spacecraft

and it will go to higher latitudes

and what we find there will be a first.

From an engineering perspective,

the thing that's most interesting to me is

how much we can learn about the inside of the planet

when everything we measure is outside.

I'm really interested in understanding

what the interior is gonna tell us, what the structure is.

Is there a core, or not?

All of those questions, big questions,

about, how do planets form, are the questions

that Juno is trying to answer.

We are the very first solar power mission

to go this far into the solar system

and one of the reasons why that works is

because we are orbiting Jupiter in a way that the planet

never blocks the spacecraft's view to the Sun.

Associated with that, our solar arrays are enormous.

When you look at our spacecraft, the first thing

that jumps out at you is just the size of it.

Our solar arrays are immense.

Our spacecraft is roughly the size

of an NBA basketball court.

Over the last 20 years or so,

solar efficiency has gotten about 50% better.

It really has allowed us to kind of cross a threshold

where it was feasible to do solar at Jupiter.

There's so many different features in the mission

that just tie together.

It's like a painting.

It's like a work of art.

It's a beautiful, elegant mission,

the way it was constructed and the way it was put together.

It's gonna give us some beautiful, elegant science.

Literally, the planets have to align.

You have to launch when Earth and Jupiter are

in the right place, 'cause if you miss that launch date,

we'd have had to wait well over a year

before we could do it.

The next critical event we had was opening the solar panels.

If you don't get those solar panels opened

within the first few hours, you don't have a mission,

you don't have a spacecraft, you're dead.

We weren't even able to test that properly on the ground.

We test opening the solar panels,

but that's in Earth's gravity.

Jupiter has the scariest radiation environment

of any planet in the solar system.

There's a huge population of energetic electrons.

They're moving at almost the speed of light.

They basically are like a spray of machine gun fire

hitting the spacecraft.

The amount of radiation that would kill a person is

about 1,000 rad.

At Jupiter, we see approximately 20 million rad

over the lifetime of our mission.

It's kind of like the epic tale, man versus beast,

David versus Goliath.

Who's gonna win?

I don't know.

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