After 1.7 billion miles Juno nails its Jupiter orbit to within tens of miles

NASA

The Juno spacecraft safely reached orbit at Jupiter on the night of July 4th. It took a lot of work to reach that point, and this gallery highlights final assembly and testing in 2010 and 2011 of the vehicle at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver.

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Traveling at a speed of 165,000mph toward a swirling gas giant Monday night, the Juno spacecraft would have no second chances. Had its Leros 1b engine burned too long, Jupiter would have swallowed Juno into its gaseous maw. If the British-made engine burned too short, the spacecraft would have zipped onward into space, lost into the inky blackness forever. But Juno needed no second chance late on the night of July 4th as its hardy little engine fired for a total of 2,102 seconds, perfect to within one second, inserting the spacecraft neatly into orbit around Jupiter.

Back on Earth engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California cheered heartily. During the last five years a team of 300 engineers have guided Juno along its path. Another 900 built and launched the spacecraft. Moments after the orbital insertion Scott Bolton, the mission's principal investigator, saluted the team of engineers, telling them they were the "best ever." In his euphoria, Bolton added, "You just did the hardest thing NASA's ever done."

Perhaps not, but it is no small thing to spend the better part of a decade building a spacecraft to survive the harsh radiation of Jupiter, launch it across 1.7 billion miles of space over five years, and then drop it precisely where you want around a planet 2.5 times more massive than all the other planets in the solar system-combined. At the end of the day Juno hit a keyhole a few tens of miles across.

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