"NASA's New Juno Mission to Explore Jupiter's Mysteries" by Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com 8/3/2011
Excerpt
The mysteries regarding the origin of the king of the planets, Jupiter, could be solved by NASA's Juno mission blasting off toward the gas giant on Friday (Aug. 5).
Jupiter is the largest of the solar system's planets, containing more than twice the amount of matter as all of the other planets combined. The primary goal of the Juno mission is to understand how Jupiter formed and evolved.
"Jupiter was likely the first planet to form, and by learning more about the earliest steps in the history of the solar system, we learn about our history too," Scott Bolton, principal investigator for the Juno mission and director of space science and engineering at the Southwestern Research Institute in San Antonio, told SPACE.com. "By going back to square one with Jupiter, we get to understand how we got here."
As our main example of what giant planets are like, Jupiter can also yield insights on many of the alien planets discovered around other stars.
"Understanding how giant planets in general work is very important — if Jupiter is any example, then they likely play a big part in how the rest of their solar systems look," Bolton said. For instance, evidence suggests that Jupiter and Saturn helped sling around other planets in the solar system.
Jupiter, like the sun, is made up of mostly of hydrogen and helium, suggesting it formed early, capturing most of the material left over after our star was born. However, how this happened is unclear. Did a massive planetary core arise first that gravitationally captured all that gas, or did an unstable region collapse in the disk of gas and dust around the sun, triggering the planet's formation?
After finishing its five-year cruise to Jupiter, Juno will map its magnetic and gravitational fields to reveal the planet's interior structure.
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