Just when we thought NASA was going to take a backseat and let privatisation take the wheel for a while, they squeeze out yet another project. It just happens to be one of the space agency’s most ambitious missions too, and will attempt to discover the secrets behind the largest planet in the solar system – Jupiter.

Later today, NASA will launch a one billion dollar solar-powered spacecraft called Juno on a five-year journey to Jupiter, in search of what makes up the solar system’s biggest planet.

Scientists say the spacecraft will arrive in the vicinity of Jupiter sometime in 2016 and will aim to study the planet’s core, atmosphere, powerful magnetic field and auroras.

They’ve also said that the aim of the three billion kilometre mission was to learn more about how the solar system was created, and hopefully, unpack some of the secrets that have remained a mystery until now.

When Juno reaches the Jupiter orbital system it will be the furthest-traveled solar-powered craft to have done so, and will also be the fastest man-made object in history – traveling at 160,000mph.

Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator and scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas:

If we want to go back in time and understand where we came from and how the planets were made, Jupiter holds this secret.

In 1989, NASA launched Galileo, an orbiter and probe that entered the Jupiter atmosphere in 1995. But that didn’t end well when it plunged into Jupiter in 2003.

Other NASA spacecraft, including Voyager numbers one and two, Ulysses and New Horizons, have done flybys of the fifth planet from the Sun, but nothing has been as comprehensive as this mission.

According to Bolton, two key experiments will gauge how much water may be on Jupiter and whether the planet “has a core of heavy elements at the centre, or whether it is just gas all the way down.”

[Source: Telegraph]