{"548741":{"#nid":"548741","#data":{"type":"external_news","title":"NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft prepares to probe Jupiter\u2019s mysteries","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EOn 4 July, NASA intends to finish a job that started with the agency\u2019s Galileo mission 21 years ago. At 8:18 p.m. Pacific time, the Juno spacecraft will ignite its main engine for 35 minutes and nudge itself into orbit around Jupiter. If all goes well, it will eventually slip into an even tighter path that whizzes as close as 4,200 kilometres above the planet\u2019s roiling cloud-tops \u2014 while dodging as much of the lethal radiation in the planet\u2019s belts as possible.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe US$1.1-billion mission, which launched in 2011, will be the first to visit the Solar System\u2019s biggest planet since NASA\u2019s Galileo spacecraft in 1995. Picking up where Galileo left off, Juno is designed to answer basic questions about Jupiter, including what its water content is, whether it has a core and what is happening at its rarely seen poles (see\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/nasa-s-juno-spacecraft-prepares-to-probe-jupiter-s-mysteries-1.20179#jupiter\u0022\u003E\u2018Mission to Jupiter\u2019\u003C\/a\u003E).\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EExploration of Jupiter\u2019s interior should reveal more about the formidable atmospheric convection that powers the planet, says Paul Steffes, an electrical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.\u0026nbsp;Steffes and his colleagues have run a series of laboratory experiments to simulate what different layers of Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere might look like: from near the cloud-tops, where experimental temperatures are \u2013100\u0026thinsp;\u00b0Cto deeper in the planet, where they rise to more than 300\u0026thinsp;\u00b0C.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":"","field_summary_sentence":"","uid":"27241","created_gmt":"2016-06-28 12:42:11","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 02:28:14","author":"Jackie Nemeth","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","publication":"college of engineering; ISyE; fellowships; grad students; student awards; orise; cdc","field_article_url":"","publication_url":"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/nasa-s-juno-spacecraft-prepares-to-probe-jupiter-s-mysteries-1.20179","dateline":{"date":"2016-06-28T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2016-06-28T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"1255","name":"School of Electrical and Computer Engineering"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}