New Delhi: NASA has released a full video showing Juno's approach to the mighty Jupiter. Ahead of its arrive at the gas giant planet, Juno captured a unique time-lapse movie of the Galilean satellites in motion about Jupiter.
As per NASA, the movie begins on June 12th with Juno 10 million miles from Jupiter, and ends on June 29th, 3 million miles distant.
As shown in the video, the innermost moon is volcanic Io; next in line is the ice-crusted ocean world Europa, followed by massive Ganymede, and finally, heavily cratered Callisto. Galileo observed these moons to change position with respect to Jupiter over the course of a few nights.
From this observation he realised that the moons were orbiting mighty Jupiter, a truth that forever changed humanity's understanding of our place in the cosmos.
Earth was not the center of the Universe. For the first time in history, we look upon these moons as they orbit Jupiter and share in Galileo’s revelation. This is the motion of nature's harmony, adds NASA.
NASA's solar-powered Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit during a 35-minute engine burn, with the confirmation of a successful insertion received on Earth at 8:53 p.m. PDT (11:53 p.m. EDT) Monday, July 4.
Over the next few months, Juno’s mission and science teams will perform final testing on the spacecraft’s subsystems, final calibration of science instruments and some science collection.
With Juno's successful orbit insertion, the probe should now be able to prepare its instruments to start sensing what lies beneath the clouds of Jupiter.
