Thejuno spaceshipNASA will depart today Friday at 17:34 (Spanish time) from Cape Canaveral (Florida), aboard the Atlas V rocket, bound for Jupiter to study the core of the planet, its auroras, the atmosphere and the origin of the magnetic field.
Juno will travel for the next five years thanks to solar energy, becoming the ship of these characteristics that will have moved the furthest from the Sun. It is equipped with a camera and nine specific instruments to carry out the investigations planned in this mission, such as the Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) or the Juno Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS).
To carry out this mission, from2016 Juno will spend 12 months in the orbit of Jupiter, a time in which it will be able torotate around the planet about 33 times, approaching up to a distance of 5,000 kilometers from the gas giant, as explained by NASA. During this time you will investigate its origin and evolution with 8 instruments designed toprobe its internal structure and gravity field, measure water and ammonia in the atmosphere, map its powerful magnetic field and observe its intense auroras. It will also have to measure the temperature in different regions of the planet and reveal what is hidden under the dense “curtain” of clouds that covers it.
The magnetic field study will be dealt with by theJuno double magnetometer, built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It will measure the magnitude of the field and its direction with greater precision than any previous instrument, revealing it for the first time in high definition (HD). “TheMagnetic field mapping is one of the few ways available to deeply understand the internal structure of Jupiter“explains Steven Levin of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who runs the Juno mission. This is because Jupiter’s atmosphere compresses its powerful gravitational field so much that it becomes impenetrable to most detection techniques.
