NASA is "officially moving forward" on a mission to conduct an unprecedented, in-depth study of Jupiter, the U.S. space agency announced Monday.
Called Juno, the mission will be the first in which a spacecraft is placed in a highly elliptical polar orbit around the giant planet to understand its formation, evolution and structure, said NASA.
Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our early solar system.
"Jupiter is the archetype of giant planets in our solar system and formed very early, capturing most of the material left after the sun formed," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute.
"Unlike Earth, Jupiter's giant mass allowed it to hold onto its original composition, providing us with a way of tracing our solar system's history."
The spacecraft is scheduled for launch in August 2011, reaching Jupiter in 2016. It will orbit Jupiter 32 times for approximately one year. The mission will be the first solar-powered spacecraft designed to operate despite the great distance from the sun.
"Jupiter is more than 640 million kms from the sun or five times further than Earth," Bolton said. "Juno is engineered to be extremely energy efficient."
The spacecraft will use a camera and nine scientific instruments to study the hidden world beneath Jupiter's colorful clouds. The suite of scientific instruments will investigate the existence of an ice-rock core, Jupiter's intense magnetic field, water and ammonia clouds in the deep atmosphere, and explore the planet's aurora borealis.
The Juno mission is the second spacecraft designed under NASA's New Frontiers Program. The first was the Pluto New Horizons mission, launched in January 2006 and scheduled to reach Pluto's moon Charon in 2015.
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