History made as probe skims past Jupiter

A spacecraft has skimmed the clouds of Jupiter in a record-breaking close approach to the giant planet.

Juno activated its whole suite of nine instruments as it soared 2,600 miles above Jupiter’s swirling cloud tops, travelling at 130,000mph, on Saturday.

Right on schedule, Nasa tweeted that Juno had successfullycompleted its closest ever fly-by of the planet, the first of 36, which are scheduled to end in February 2018.

Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said: “Early post- fly- by telemetry indicates that eve r ything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders.”

Mission controllers at the space agency expect to capture stunning images and a wealth of scientific data from the approach, but it will take some days for all the data collected to be downloaded on Earth. “We are getting some intriguing early data returns as we speak,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio yesterday. “It will takedays for all the data collected during the flyby to be downlinked and even more to begin to comprehendwhatJunoandJupiter are trying to tell us.

“This is our first opportunity to really take a closeup look at the king of our solar system and begin to figure out how he works.”

Nasa hopes to release a few close-up images from JunoCam, the probe’s panoramic colour camera, later this week.

An artist's impression of Juno passing over Jupiter