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(suspenseful instrumental music)
T minus three, two, one, ignition,
and lift off of Juno on a trek to Jupiter.
August 2011,
NASA launches the Juno spacecraft.
It's mission: to unlock the secrets of our solar system's
biggest planet, Jupiter.
How did this gas giant form?
What powers its violent storms?
What can the oldest planet tell us
about the formation of our solar system and us?
Now, after a five year journey,
Juno is on the brink of discovery.
(cheering and applause)
All stations on Juno co-ord,
we have the tone for burn cutoff on delta-B.
Welcome to Jupiter.
(loud cheering)
And we're in.
So we're there.
We're in orbit.
We conquered Jupiter.
And now the fun begins.
The science.
(commanding instrumental music)
It's the largest planet in the solar system,
but Jupiter remains an enigma.
Even though we've been studying Jupiter
for hundreds of years, we still don't know
some pretty basic things about it.
We see these jet streams moving back and forth
across Jupiter's atmosphere at hundreds of miles an hour.
We don't really understand what drives them.
We don't know how it's built,
how the structure works inside.
We think down in the center, there should be a dense core,
but we don't have any direct evidence that it exists.
Maybe most important, we don't know how Jupiter was made.
Jupiter lies 500 million miles from Earth,
but unlike our world, this gas giant
remains virtually unchanged since the solar system formed.
It's an archaeological treasure trove.
The key to unlocking some of our most enduring questions.
How did the Earth get formed?
Where did the elements come from that made up life itself?
That's one of the things Juno is seeking to answer.
Jupiter formed around 4.5 billion years ago
with the rest of the solar system.
As that process happened, there should have been a
donut-shaped cloud of gas and dust
surrounding the forming sun
that collapsed to make the planets.
First Jupiter and then the others.
Over time, the planet swept up vast amounts
of original material, growing into a giant.
Jupiter, all by itself, is more than twice the mass
of all the other planets combined.
It's huge.
Everything in the entire solar system,
all the planets, all the asteroids, all the comets,
would fit inside of Jupiter.
(hopeful instrumental music)
The billion dollar Juno mission
is armed with some of the most advanced technology
ever engineered.
Our camera, JunoCam, will take great pictures.
Our ultraviolet camera will take ultraviolet images
and see the aurora.
The infrared camera will take pictures over the pole.
And, of course, all the other instruments
will get a chance to observe Jupiter on every orbit.
(suspenseful instrumental music)
Getting close enough
to help unlock Jupiter's elusive secrets
is fraught with danger.
In some ways, Jupiter is the most dangerous place
in the solar system to fly a spacecraft.
This image reveals what Juno's up against:
intense belts of radiation,
swarming with high energy electrons,
seen here in red.
(suspenseful instrumental music)
These electrons just eat electronics.
They just will kill the spacecraft.
So Juno has a radiation vault
where all the sensitive electronics
are shielded behind walls of titanium.
It's sort of like we're sending
an armored tank to Jupiter.
If you were sitting outside of this vault
on our spacecraft,
by the end of the mission,
you would have gotten the equivalent of
about 100 million dental x-rays,
which would be like sitting in a dentist chair
getting an x-ray once a second, every second
for a bit over three years.
But inside this vault, you'd only be getting the equivalent
of about a day and half or so.
Not too bad.
To help protect Juno,
the spacecraft will be placed in a polar orbit
that avoids the deadliest radiation belts at the equator,
and by orbiting pole to pole,
Juno will reveal the whole planet like never before.
If you look at our current maps of Jupiter,
the north and south pole are just kind of a blur.
Because Juno's in a polar orbit,
for the first time, we'll get a good look
at the north and south pole of Jupiter.
(ominous instrumental music)
Juno is on a suicide mission.
It won't survive Jupiter's lethal radiation forever.
But it's hoped the spacecraft can last for around two years,
building up the most comprehensive profile of Jupiter ever,
from it's violent birth billions of years ago
to the colorful kaleidoscope of storms we see today.
(thrilling instrumental music)
On arrival, Juno will come face-to-face
with Jupiter's violent weather.
Jupiter's weather is the most dynamic
in the entire solar system.
It's atmosphere is filled with
these incredible zones and belts
moving in different directions and at different speeds,
creating storms that last over 300 years,
like the great red spot.
This is real turbulence.
(ominous instrumental music)
The great red spot is massive.
It rises five miles above the cloud tops
and could swallow two Earths.
But what drives it?
It looks a little bit like a hurricane on the Earth,
but it must work in a different way,
because there's no ocean or land underneath it,
which is what we have on the Earth.
Jupiter's storms cover vast areas,
but exactly how deep they go isn't known.
Using a unique set of instruments,
it's microwave radiometers,
Juno will measure energy
emanating from beneath the cloud tops,
revealing for the the first time,
the weather conditions hundreds of miles below,
seeing if the storms are deep-seated
or relatively shallow.
Juno's radiometers will also play another vital role:
unlocking Jupiter's chemistry.
The global water content of Jupiter
is one of the most important numbers
we can measure with the Juno spacecraft.
Scientists know Jupiter contains water,
but exactly how much remains a mystery.
By finding an answer, Juno hopes to solve
a great scientific puzzle:
how much water ice was involved in forming the planets?
We know this is important
because we're still trying to explain
how did Earth get its oceans.
We don't really know.
Jupiter's a time capsule.
It preserves the original ingredients
from which all the planets formed.
If Jupiter formed from large chunks of ice
that collided together and stuck
until you had enough gravity
to pull in all the other material,
then you'd expect a large amount of water from that ice.
Or if it formed from the initial cloud of gas and dust
and it wasn't the ice at all
sticking together that made the planet,
all of those things would give you different measurement
for how much water there is in Jupiter.
If Juno discovers Jupiter is relatively wet,
then water ice must have played
an important role in planetary formation
and could explain Earth's oceans.
But if Jupiter is relatively dry,
scientists will need another theory
to explain how the Earth became a water world,
teeming with life.
(serene instrumental music)
At almost 500 million miles from the sun,
Juno must survive on just 4% of the amount of sunlight
the Earth catches.
Powering all of Juno's instruments is not easy.
The spacecraft relies on three giant
29 foot-long solar arrays.
It's the furthest from the sun this technology
has ever been tried.
The reason these solar arrays have to be so big,
is Jupiter is five times farther away from the sun
than the Earth is, so these arrays have to be so big
just to give us about 500 watts of power.
On Earth,
heat from the sun drives our weather.
But Jupiter lurks in the dark.
So what powers its ferocious storms?
(thunder clapping)
Jupiter's really far away from the sun,
so it must be driven by something very different.
The answer lies with its size.
So Jupiter has this enormous amount of heat,
generated from when it formed.
Now, billions of years later, it's still generating heat
because it's still very, very slowly collapsing,
a centimeter or two a year.
Juno will sense this heat
welling up from below,
hopefully answering if it's this energy
that powers the solar system's most dynamic weather.
(rolling thunder)
(mysterious instrumental music)
What lies deeper within Jupiter is even more mysterious.
Scientists think below the clouds
is one of the weirdest places in the solar system,
where unearthly metals form
under the planets crushing weight.
The pressure is so high,
the conditions are so intense,
that you take that gas and you squeeze it down
so much that it becomes a liquid.
Down here, Juno might detect a layer
where skies rain not water, but liquid hydrogen.
Descend even deeper and the big squeeze continues,
creating an even stranger substance.
Well about 1/3 of the way in, you're getting to a pressure
that's something like two million times
the pressure here on the Earth,
and that's a key number because
that's about where hydrogen gas becomes a metal,
liquid metallic hydrogen.
Here, Juno may discover a vast metal ocean.
Perhaps the largest ocean in the solar system.
(thunder clapping)
Finally, we reach the core.
Here it's thought the crushing pressure
peaks at a staggering 650 million pounds per square inch,
the equivalent of being under a pile of cars
over 100 miles high.
Under such extreme conditions,
what lies here is anyone's guess.
We have no idea even how
hydrogen behaves at such a pressure
and maybe there's a core of heavy elements down deep
at this very level.
That's one of the things Juno's seeking to answer.
Whatever Juno discovers,
it's down here that Jupiter generates
its most dazzling feature of all.
A magnetic field, much like the Earth's,
flows from pole to pole,
but like everything else on Jupiter, it's enormous.
Jupiter has the largest magnetic field
in the entire solar system.
In fact, Jupiter's magnetosphere
is the largest structure in the entire solar system.
Ten times more powerful
than Earth's magnetic field,
it creates some of the brightest lights in the solar system,
Jupiter's aurora.
On Jupiter, the aurora are bigger than the whole Earth.
They're caused by particles streaming down
the magnetic field lines,
hit the upper atmosphere and it glows.
Juno's unique polar orbit
will provide the perfect position to study these particles
and the brilliant celestial fireworks they create.
Juno arrives at Jupiter on the fourth of July,
hopefully giving scientists something extra to celebrate
as the spacecraft ushers in a new exciting chapter
in our understanding of the solar system.
I think maybe one of the most fascinating questions
that Juno is trying to answer is
what's the recipe for solar systems.
If we can help just answer that one question,
that would be so great.
How did the whole solar system form?
Where do we come from?
How did we get here?
To me, that's the big important part of the Juno mission
is that we're going to try to understand
something much larger than ourselves
by trying to understand
the largest planet in the solar system.
(majestic instrumental music)