"Juno Mission": successful conference on NASA’s space mission to Jupiter

Dr. J. Scott Bolton, Juno’s lead researcher and Assistant Vice-President at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) of Space Science, Division of Engineering in San Antonio, Texas, and Rick Nybakken , Project Manager for the Juno mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), gave a presentation last Thursday to a room full of attendees at Isdefe detailing the "Juno" space mission to the planet Jupiter. In this presentation, the experts gave details on the mission and the research, aimed at understanding the origin of our solar system and the formation and evolution of the giant planets.

Launched by NASA in August 2011, the Juno spacecraft will reach the planet Jupiter on July 4. As shown in their statements, the interest of this mission is that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, with more than twice the mass of all the other planets combined, and it is believed to be the first to have formed.

Many attendees came from universities and space research centers. As the conference demonstrated, some important aspects of the giant planet remain a mystery, such as its internal structure, including the size or even the existence of a central core, the dynamics of the atmosphere, its magnetic field, etc. As the experts noted, using microwave radiometry NASA will have the opportunity to study the planet for 20 months from a distance of 5,000 km, in order to understand its origin, learn its internal structure, and the composition and characteristics of its atmosphere and magnetosphere. "Therefore,” they affirmed, “helping to understand the origin of Jupiter is essential to understanding how our solar system began, the formation of giant planets and their evolution."

The conference was presented by Lluís Vinagre, Marketing Manager of the Business Development Department at Isdefe, the company that manages the operation and maintenance of the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex (MDSCC) for the National Institute for Aerospace Technology (INTA). MDSCC, located in Robledo de Chavela (Madrid), is a part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). In 2014 the network, which is where communications for space missions are controlled, celebrated its 50th anniversary.