Juno & Jupiter

On August 4 & 5, I'll be at Kennedy Space Center for the launch of the Juno Mission to Jupiter. NASA is awesome and has these things called tweetups for people who are social media and space nerds all at the same time. I'll be right by where the media sit by the countdown clock and I'll be at presentations with some of the smartest scientists in the world. What I'm probably most excited about though, is the 4 hour tour that's going to take me places the public never gets to go, like the Vehicle Assembly Building, the Atlas V spaceflight center (where the Juno mission and next Mars rover mission live), and Launch complex 17 (where the GRAIL mission to the moon is launching from next month). Oh, and Bill Nye @thescienceguy is going to be there too.

Rather than bore you with all the other nerdy details (because I'll be doing that while I'm there), here are the top 5 awesomely awesome things I think you should know about Juno & Jupiter.

5. After mapping the entire planet by orbiting it 33 times, Juno will dive into Jupiter's atmosphere and hopefully send us some cool pictures. It's got 7 crazy long named science instruments (ex: a six-wavelength microwave radiometer for atmospheric sounding and composition) but it's also got a good old color camera to send back some pictures of stuff we've never seen before, like Jupiter's north and south pole.

4. The space craft has a span of 66 feet because its solar panels are so big. They have to be that big, because Jupiter gets about 25X less sunlight than earth. NASA's never made a solar powered spacecraft that's gone that far from the sun before.

3. If you add up all the mass of everything in the solar system; planets, asteroids, comets (not the sun) Jupiter is bigger than all those combined.

2. The flight path of Juno is ridiculous. (and when I say ridiculous, I mean awesome.) After launch in August, it will fly out toward the orbit of Mars. Next August and September (2012) it's going to flip itself around and head back to Earth, because it's going to use the Earth's gravity to give itself the push it needs to get all the way to Jupiter. (If Newton & Kepler could have imagined we'd be using their stuff to slingshot billion dollar spacecraft to other planets, they'd probably be pretty excited. Just sayin'.) After the help from earth in October of 2013, Juno just cruises to Jupiter. It'll get there in 2016. Confused? Yeah, me too. here's a picture from NASA to help.

1. The goal of this mission is to really figure out how to make a planet. Isn't it cool that we know so much about so many things, but when it comes to the basic ingredients/recipe for a planet we still don't really know? Obviously, most scientists have a pretty good idea, but when it comes to science, things change. A lot. And that's what makes it so fun to teach.


If you want to learn more about Juno, visit The University of Wisconsin-Madison Juno mission website or NASA's Juno Mission page.