5 years after its launch, Juno spacecraft just days away from Jupiter

A photo taken by Juno of Jupiter and the surrounding area.

(Image credit: Twitter.com/NASAJuno)

last updated 1 July 2016

After breezing through Jupiter's magnetosphere, NASA's Juno spacecraft is on track to begin orbiting the planet on the Fourth of July.

"We've just crossed the boundary into Jupiter's home turf," principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said in a statement Thursday. "We're closing in fast on the planet itself and already gaining valuable data." Juno was fully inside Jupiter's magnetosphere, the largest structure in the solar system, by June 25, NASA said. The magnetosphere extends about 5 astronomical units beyond Jupiter (each AU is about 93 million miles), and if it "glowed in visible light, it would be twice the size of the full moon as seen from Earth," said Juno team member William Kurth of the University of Iowa.

Juno was launched in August 2011, and over the next 18 months, the spacecraft is scheduled to circle around Jupiter more than 30 times, using nine different scientific instruments to gather data. NASA hopes to map out the planet's magnetic and gravitational fields and determine if it has a core or not, Space.com reports, and also gain new information about the universe as a whole. "What Juno's really about is learning about the recipe for how solar systems are made," Bolton said.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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