After 1.7 billion miles Juno nails its Jupiter orbit to within tens of miles
NASA
The Juno spacecraft safely reached orbit at Jupiter on the night of July 4th. It took a lot of work to reach that point, and this gallery highlights final assembly and testing in 2010 and 2011 of the vehicle at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver.
Traveling at a speed of 165,000mph toward a swirling gas giant Monday night, the Juno spacecraft would have no second chances. Had its Leros 1b engine burned too long, Jupiter would have swallowed Juno into its gaseous maw. If the British-made engine burned too short, the spacecraft would have zipped onward into space, lost into the inky blackness forever. But Juno needed no second chance late on the night of July 4th as its hardy little engine fired for a total of 2,102 seconds, perfect to within one second, inserting the spacecraft neatly into orbit around Jupiter.
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