Mankind touches Jupiter

A SPACECRAFT sent from Earth yesterday 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 2600 miles above Jupiter’s swirling cloud tops, travelling at 130,000 mph.

Right on schedule, the agency tweeted that Juno had successfully completed its closest ever fly-by to 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 everything 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 to be downloaded to our planet.

No previous spacecraft has flown so near to Jupiter before – unless aliens have, but not told us!