Juno To Hopefully Enter Orbit Around Jupiter on July 4th

The latest space probe to investigate Jupiter will hopefully slow down enough to be pulled into orbit by the giant planet on July 4th. Juno, NASA’s latest mission to Jupiter will fire it rockets to slow itself down from the current speed of over 150,000 miles per hour and be captured in Jupiter’s orbit. It will then orbit the giant gas planet for about the next 16 months before diving directly into the planet and burning up. This will be the second mission to orbit around Jupiter, the first being Galileo nearly 20 years ago. This time, more advanced instruments will give us more information about how the planet was formed and what is its actual composition and, by knowing that, we will have an even better idea of how exactly our solar system was formed. So, while we are all out having fun at our July 4th barbecue, JPL scientist will be waiting with baited breath for a 3 second beep that will have taken over 40 minutes to reach them and will indicate that the rocket firing has been successful and Juno, after 5 years and just under 2 billion miles traveled, is in orbit around Jupiter.