NASA's Juno mission skims Jupiter clouds in record-breaking mission

NASA’s Juno mission successfully skims through Jupiter’s clouds as it completed its closest ever fly-by

Five years after its launch, NASA’s Juno spacecraft soared ,2600 miles over Jupiter travelling at 130,000 mph.

NASA’s Juno mission successfully skimmed through Jupiter’s clouds as it completed its closest ever fly-by in the first of 36 such passes that the craft is scheduled to make over the next 18 months.

"Early post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders," said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.



"We are in an orbit nobody has ever been in before, and these images give us a whole new perspective on this gas-giant world," said Bolton.

Infrared image taken from Junocam   PHOTO: NASA

“It will take days for all the data to be downlinked, and even more to begin to comprehend what Juno and Jupiter are trying to tell us. This is our first opportunity to really take a close-up look at the king of our solar system and begin to figure out how he works.”

Image showing Jupiter planet 437,000 miles away PHOTO: NASA



The only other spacecraft to orbit Jupiter was Galileo, during its mission between 1995 to 2003. Galileo orbited much further out than Juno. Like Galileo, Juno at the end of its 20 month mission, is expected to make a one-way plunge into the planet’s thick atmosphere.

This article originally appeared on The Guardian.