Journey to Jupiter

At 03.18 GMT on Tuesday, the NASA space probe Juno entered the orbit of Jupiter. With 1.74 billion miles and five years of travel behind it, Juno will now complete 37 orbits of the gas giant, taking approximately 14 days each. The aim of Juno's mission has been described by principle investigator Scott Bolton:

"What Juno’s about is looking beneath that surface. We’ve got to go down and look at what’s inside, see how it’s built, how deep these features go, learn about its real secrets.”

Not only is the mission remarkable in terms of scale, the sheer complexity and risks involved really make this a great achievement. Juno's project manager, Diane Brown, shed some light on this:

“The risks that were overcome, it’s amazing. The more you know about the mission the more you know about how tricky it was. To know we can go to bed tonight not worrying about what is going to happen tomorrow, is just amazing,"

The probe is fitted with 29 sensors and 9 instruments and is powered by almost 19 thousand solar cells. The total cost of the mission has been put at 1.1 billion U.S. dollars.