At 8:51 a.m. EDT (5:51 a.m. PDT) Aug. 27, NASA's Juno probe will be at its closest to Jupiter's cloud tops than at any other time during the spacecraft's prime mission.
At that point, Juno will be moving at 130,000 mph and will be located 2,600 miles above the gas giant's swirling clouds. The probe is set to make 35 more flybys around Jupiter, but this will be the first time that the spacecraft will have all of its instruments activated.
"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," said Scott Bolton, a principal Juno investigator from San Antonio's Southwest Research Institute.
Juno entered Jupiter's orbit on July 4 but its instruments were turned off to devote energy to the rocket burn necessary to getting the probe in place. More tests will have to be carried out, but NASA has checked Juno thoroughly and is confident that everything is working great.
Data gathered by Juno during the flyby should make its way to Earth in a matter of days, but NASA is unlikely to release the results and interpretations right away.
Steve Levin, a Juno project scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said there are bound to be surprises since this is the first time that the agency has gotten so close to Jupiter. As such, they will be taking their time to ensure that all conclusions made are correct.
Among Juno's suite of scientific instruments is the JunoCam. The visible light imager will be responsible for snapping closeups of Jupiter, which should be released later next week. The closeups will be accompanied by high-resolution images of the gas giant's atmosphere and the first-ever looks at the planet's northern and southern poles.
After entering Jupiter's orbit, Juno immortalized the milestone by taking pictures of the largest planet in the solar system. One of the first images it was able to capture showed Jupiter along with its three largest moons: Io, Ganymede and Europa. The same image also showed the planet's Great Red Spot.
At the time that Juno took its first images after entering Jupiter's orbit, it was located some 2.7 million miles from the planet.
Juno was launched on Aug. 5, 2011. After a five-year journey, it is now ready to start its 20-month mission and gather data that will help NASA better understand Jupiter. Aside from taking images, Juno is also tasked with mapping the planet's magnetic field and measuring the amount of ammonia and water in Jupiter's atmosphere.
The probe is set to end its mission on February 2018.
