How The Fastest Spacecraft Ever Will Enter Orbit Around Jupiter

How the fastest spacecraft ever will enter orbit around Jupiter

For 35 perilous minutes, Juno will be in a make-or-break rocket burn to get into polar orbit around Jupiter.

Juno is headed toward an encounter Monday with Jupiter, when the fastest spacecraft ever will take a dangerous plunge about 2,900 miles (4,667 kilometers) above the surface of Jupiter. While the deep gravity well of Jupiter will help to grab onto the craft, it will still have to do some maneuvering to get into place.

At 10:18 p.m. CT on Monday night, the Juno craft will begin a 35-minute engine firing as it approaches the north pole of the planet. This will take place at closest approach when gravity is strongest. The craft, which is moving at 165,000 mph (265,541.76 km/h) toward Jupiter, will slow down by 1,212 mph (542 meters/s).

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(NASA) Saturn in Blue and Gold Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

Why is Saturn partly blue? The above picture of Saturn approximates what a human would see if hovering close to the giant ringed world. The above picture was taken in 2006 March by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Here Saturn’s majestic rings appear directly only as a thin vertical line. The rings show their complex structure in the dark shadows they create on the image left. Saturn’s fountain moon Enceladus, only about 500 kilometers across, is seen as the bump in the plane of the rings. The northern hemisphere of Saturn can appear partly blue for the same reason that Earth’s skies can appear blue – molecules in the cloudless portions of both planet’s atmospheres are better at scattering blue light than red. When looking deep into Saturn’s clouds, however, the natural gold hue of Saturn’s clouds becomes dominant. It is not known why southern Saturn does not show the same blue hue – one hypothesis holds that clouds are higher there. It is also not known why Saturn’s clouds are colored gold.