The US space agency has successfully put a new probe in orbit around Jupiter. The Juno satellite, which left Earth five years ago, had to fire a rocket engine to slow its approach to the planet and get caught by its gravity. A sequence of tones transmitted from the spacecraft confirmed the braking manoeuvre had gone as planned. Receipt of the radio messages prompted wild cheering at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Scientists plan to use the spacecraft to sense the planet’s deep interior. They think the structure and the chemistry of its insides hold clues to how this giant world formed some four-and-a-half-billion years ago. No previous spacecraft has dared pass so close to Jupiter; its intense radiation belts can destroy unprotected electronics.

Juno will now take a series of risky dives beneath Jupiter’s intense radiation belts where it will study the gas giant from as close as 2,600 miles over the planet’s cloud tops. The last mission to the gas giant, Galileo, which ended in 2003, spent most of its mission five times farther away than Juno will get. The aim of the mission is to collect data about how the solar system formed.

Also Note:

NASA has given the green light to the New Horizons mission to push on to investigate a mysterious object deep in the Kuiper Belt, known as 2014 MU69. New Horizons has vastly improved our understanding of the dwarf planet Pluto, following its historic first-ever flyby in June last year. It is now expected to reach 2014 MU69, an ancient object considered one of the early building blocks of the solar system, as early as January 2019.