For centuries, we studied the planet Jupiter with instruments like this.
But if you're like me, and I know I am, you wanna know more.
And in order to know more, we've gotta get a spacecraft up close.
But Jupiter is fantastically far away, way out there! So how do we do it?
So if you're like me, you wanna know more
about all those planets out there. So to that end
we built the Juno spacecraft to study
the planet Jupiter. Juno was Jupiter's wife
in Roman mythology, and we launched the Juno
spacecraft from Earth way back in 2011.
Now, like everything else the government does, we were on a budget, so we had to use a rocket
that already existed, so we chose the good
ol' Atlas V. We launched it from the Earth,
way out into space, beyond the orbit of Mars.
And today, it's falling back toward the Earth,
and we're gonna use the orbital motion of
the Earth and this flyby of the Juno spacecraft,
to get enough energy to escape the pull of
the Earth, and more importantly, the pull of the sun.
Like this. [ROCKET NOISE]
But see, it's in outer space, there's no air, so there's no sound,
so it goes like this:
[SILENCE]
And it's gonna fly by the Earth on October 9th.
Now Jupiter isn't as close as these two planets on this table.
Jupiter is way out there, fantastically far out there.
It's that far away.
So Juno won't arrive there until 2016.
In 2016, it will go into orbit around Jupiter, and using its suite of sophisticated instruments, Juno will
study this planet, will learn more about what
Jupiter's made of, and how it formed. When
we learn that, we'll know more about where we came from, how we all got here.
With this small spacecraft, we could, dare I say it, change the world!
[LAUGHTER]
