Nasa’s Juno probe nears critical manoeuvre

PanARMENIAN.Net - The U.S. space agency's (Nasa) Juno probe is rapidly bearing down on Jupiter, BBC News reports.

Getting ever closer, hour by hour, it will endeavour to be captured by the gas giant's gravity early on Tuesday, July 5 (GMT) to go into orbit.

This will require the probe to execute a perfect braking manoeuvre using its British-made rocket engine.

If successful, Juno will then spend the better part of the next eighteen months sensing what lies beneath the planet's thick clouds.

The 35-minute orbit insertion burn - timed to to start at 03:18 GMT (04:18 BST) on Tuesday - is sure to jangle the nerves of everyone here in mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

If the engine fails to fire at the right time or for an insufficient period, this $1.1bn (£800m) venture will simply fly straight past Jupiter and into the oblivion of deep space.

Juno will not have its main dish pointed at Earth during the braking procedure, so the mission team will have to follow events via a series of simple tones sent back through the probe's low-gain antenna.

Assuming everything goes to plan, Juno's mission is to look down on the giant world to work out what it is made from and how it is put together.

We should finally discover whether it has a solid core or if its gas merely compresses to an ever denser state all the way to the centre.