NASA's Juno Blasts Off To Investigate Jupiter

coondoggie writes "NASA shot its 4-ton Juno spacecraft into the cosmos today with the ultimate goal of learning everything we can about the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter. Juno, once described as a flying armored tank, will take five years to reach its destination, slated to arrive at Jupiter in August 2016." NASA has an explanation of the steps involved in getting Juno through the launch, and an animated film explaining the mission. The mission website has streaming video of Juno's progress, and NASA's press kit explains the goals and the spacecraft in detail (PDF).

Comments

This is a good mission

[JoshuaZ]

This is the first major mission to Jupiter since Galileo which was launched in 1989. Unlike Galileo this won't be focusing on the moons as much (which is sort of too bad since they are some of the most interesting things about Jupiter since they might harbor life.) Also, as TFA discusses, this has a lot of stuff to help deal with the high radiation which hasn't been used before. Seeing how exactly that technology works will help out a lot with future probes to high radiation or high magnetic field environments. One other nice thing about this is that we might get more information about the core which is currently hypothesized to be metalic hydrogen because the hydrogen is just under such high pressure that it becomes a solid, and that's freaking awesome.