Juno : An Investigation Of Our Biggest Planet

Jupiter is a VERY important planet. Not only does is it the biggest planet in our solar system, but it keeps thousands of minor planets in their orbits. There is a family of minor planets (or asteroids) in the same plane as Jupiter. These are called Trojan asteroids. Scientists have divided these into two groups the “Greeks” and the “Trojans”. The “Greeks” come before Jupiter and the “Trojans” follow Jupiter. These asteroids are as far away from Jupiter as they are from the sun; because of this they stay and will continue to stay in the positions they are in because the gravitational pull from Jupiter and the sun are the same.

This activity is about the main events in New Horizon’s journey to Pluto and beyond.

The mission called the New Horizons created a spacecraft, which is nuclear-powered and had the capability of gathering 10 times the data for scientific research. Another factor that led to the New Horizons mission to be the winner is that it only costed $250 million dollars. The New Horizons mission sent a spacecraft on February 2, 2006 and which is expected to will flyby Pluto by the year 2015. Astronomers were able to find three Kuiper Belt objects that are significant for New Horizons mission. The principal investigator of the New Horizons, Alan Stern stated,“ Astronomer Gerard Kuiper, who wrote a paper in 1951 about smaller objects that were farther away

NASA - NSSDC - Spacecraft - Details. 2015. NASA - NSSDC - Spacecraft - Details. [ONLINE] Available at:http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1966-020A. [Accessed 10 June 2015].

Christopher Crokett says, “On July 14, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will reach the dwarf planet and try to learn all it can about Pluto and its five known moons. Then the probe will leave Pluto behind, vanishing into the frigid darkness beyond the planets.”

The discovery of the Neptune planet was the result of various hypotheses, generated by different astronomers and mathematicians from 1781 to 1847. The article entitled “Accounting for Anomaly: The Discovery of Neptune” describes how Neptune was mathematically identified, before being directly observed, using the calculations of Urbain Le Verrier. He made the hypothesis that the Newtonian gravitation law could not fully explain the series of irregularities in the path of the Uranus planet. Le Verrier suggested the existence of another planet, after Uranus, that could affect its gravity. In 1845 his hypothesis followed a series of calculations to determine the nature and position of this unknown planet. By this calculations Le Verrier’s understood

Today Pluto is now known as an icy gaseous white dwarf planet and is the second largest white dwarf planet with Eris being the largest. My submission will support my argument that Pluto should not be classified as a Planet or a Small Solar System Body, but a Dwarf Planet as classified in 2006, by the International Astronomical Union. First, the physical characteristics of Pluto support that Pluto has been properly reclassified as a dwarf planet. Pluto's density and size are much smaller than all other planets, as studies have confirmed that Pluto's width is 1582 miles long and the length is 1400 miles long and its mass is less than 0.024% of the planet earth.

The New Horizons space mission taught astronomers a lot about Pluto that cannot be seen with any telescope on Earth. For example, “this fascinating world has blue skies, spinning moons, …. And it snows - but the snow is red” (“Solar System Exploration: Pluto: In Depth.”). In addition to this, astronomers also discovered that Pluto had more moons than they originally thought.

There are lots of intriguing information about NASA’s space probe, Galileo. Galileo’s mission was a very valuable. The results of the mission have been very beneficial to NASA. The technology of the spacecraft was phenomenal.

New Horizons Administrator John Grunsfeld explained that now begins a 16 month stream of data, detailed observations New Horizons has recorded about the Pluto system. With untold discoveries about to be revealed “This really is the beginning,” he said.

On August 5th , 2011 in Canaveral, Florida NASA launched a spacecraft. The spacecraft called Juno was sent to orbit Jupiter. It took Juno five years to travel 2.9 billion kilometers to Jupiter. Juno was sent to gather information so we could answer more questions about the planet. Juno was getting closer to one of the gas giants in our solar system than we have ever gone before. On July 4th , Juno was in orbit with Jupiter after his long journey.

Huge, striped, and marked by a unique giant red spot, Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and is much different from Earth. Incredibly enormous in size it would take 11 Earths combined to be the same size as Jupiter. Although it is much larger than Earth, Jupiter is void of a solid surface like the Earth. Being a gas giant planet, Jupiter consists mainly of hydrogen and helium compared to Earth’s nitrogen and oxygen. One complete orbit of Jupiter around the Sun is the same time Earth orbits the Sun 18 times.. One day on Jupiter is only 10 Earth hours, meaning that Jupiter rotates faster on its axis than the Earth. Even though Jupiter is so large compared to all of the other planets in the solar system, it is still too small

Jupiter is not a party planet. I also wanted to know why Jupiter spins so fast, so of course I searched it up! I got some complicated answers, But as far as I understood, it was how it formed. There’s a boundary in the solar system that people call the snow. Line.

According to the article, astronomers have discovered and announced the most exciting exoplanet discover to date, which is an Earth-like planet orbiting a red dwarf star around Proxima Centauri. This planet has named as Proxima b. Proxima b is a roughly Earth size and lying approximately 4.2 light years away from our own solar system. Besides, the conditions of that planet might be suitable for water or even life in that atmosphere. Per the article, NASA has scheduled to launch $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope to study this Planet in 2018. This could help the astronomers to learn more Proxima b’s atmospheres of transiting exoplanets and look for possible signs of life. Moving forward, it will have a huge massive impact of philosophical,

R. Wagner Article Review of “Revealing Jupiter’s Inner Secrets” Jupiter is the largest, most massive, fastest spinning, most magnetized and most orbited planet in the solar system. For years scientists and astronomers have been estimating the inner workings of Jupiter underneath its distracting clouds. In 1995 they were finally able to find out some answers when the Galileo probe entered Jupiter’s atmosphere to take measurements. They decided to send up a probe, Juno, that would measure microwaves without getting trapped in the equatorial belt of energetic charged particles. Juno will measure the water and ammonia levels of Jupiter by using 6 different microwave wavelength ranges. Astronomers hope to learn many things from this probe including