American Spacecraft Juno Soon to Arrive at Jupiter

The American unmanned spacecraft Juno, launched in August 2011, is scheduled to arrive at the planet Jupiter, its destination, on July 4th...eight days from now.  Loaded with scientific instruments and experiments designed to gather information about our largest planet, it will then go into an elliptical polar orbit (designed to escape most of the effects of Jupiter's radiation) for several months.  Some of the project's main objectives are to determine the planet's water composition and the nature of its core.  Also, Jupiter's gravitational and magnetic fields will be studied...the former should reveal the distribution of mass in the planet while the latter may enlighten researchers about the general nature of magnetic fields in some planets and how they originate...

Juno is the first deep space probe that is solar-powered.  It initially travelled beyond the orbit of Mars in 2012 and whipped back past Earth the following year to gain the necessary velocity to get to Jupiter.  I'm not sure about any spectacular pictures coming out of this expedition...only common sense would tell the project organizers that this would be a no-brainer, as our space program needs all the promotion it can get...remember the unbelievable shots of Pluto from last year's New Horizons probe?

I was wondering which news media outlet would first let on about Juno's impending arrival at Jupiter.  Others may have covered it first, but it was FoxNews that first broke the news to me yesterday.  Kudos to them, my other reservations about this channel notwithstanding...

So this coming Independence Day, turn on the news and see what's going on deep in space, high above our Jupiter.  By the way, you can see Jupiter in the evening if you look up at the western sky...you'll recognize it because it will easily be the brightest "star" out there...