After a nearly five-year journey, NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft achieved orbit around Jupiter on Monday night. Juno navigated a tricky maneuver — including slowing by around 1,212 mph — to insert itself into orbit in what NASA calls “the king of our solar system.” Over the coming days and weeks, mission managers will be instructing the spacecraft to turn its scientific instruments back on. They were all turned off for the insertion maneuver to reduce the risk of a computer glitch. The instruments won’t make their first close-up measurements of Jupiter until the end of August. That’s because Juno is in a large, oval-shaped orbit that takes it far from the planet, only returning to Jupiter 53.5 days after it first arrived.
Juno Craft Is Orbiting Jupiter
