American Spacecraft Juno Successfully Establishes Jupiter Orbit

Nine days ago, in an article on this blog, I wrote about the impending arrival of the American unmanned spacecraft Juno at Jupiter, to take place on July 4...yesterday.  I also suggested that people wanting to see some reporting about that arrival tune in to one of the cable news channels to get the news.  Well, Juno was scheduled, around 11 pm Eastern Time, to execute a complex maneuver that would establish a stable polar orbit around our largest planet.  It would take only about 30 minutes, and then the mission specialists would know about its success.  Unfortunately, CNN, FoxNews, HLN, and MSNBC all had decided to air non-news programming at the time, so there was no live televised reporting of this significant event in our national space program...unless, of course, you were watching the NASA Channel.  Once the live general news coverage finally resumed, it was reported that the orbit was successfully performed, and quite accurately at that...cause for much celebration for the project's organizers and anyone interested in our space endeavors, as well as for the furtherance of science...especially in the realm of astronomy...

Juno will continue to orbit Jupiter until 2018, when it will be sent to its destruction into the planet...in order, they say, to avoid the potential contamination of any Jovian moons that might be harboring life.  From time to time in the weeks to come, we should be hearing about Juno's various experiments, as well as getting to see some pretty dazzling close-up pictures of Jupiter...

By the way, here is a link to that earlier article [link]...