- NASA’s spacecraft
- JUNO is an acronym for Jupiter Near-polar Orbiter
- Entered into the orbit of Jupiter
- It will orbit Jupiter from pole to pole, 5,000 kilometres above planet’s cloud
- Launched by NASA as part of its New Frontiers program in 2011 to study Jupiter’s composition, gravity field, magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere
- Unmanned spacecraft
- Juno is not the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. It is second spacecraft to orbit Jupiter, after Galileo probe which had orbited the planet from 1995–2003. Galileo probe in its mission had found evidence of subsurface saltwater on Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto
- It is powered by solar energy.
- The primary goals of the mission are to find out whether Jupiter has a solid core, how its atmosphere and magnetosphere formed, and whether there is water in the gas cloud shrouding the planet.