American space agency NASA sent the Juno Mission spacecraft to planet Jupiter to study its temperature, clouds, water composition, gravitational and magnetic fields, and other properties.
The spacecraft was launched in 2011 and entered a polar orbit of Jupiter in 2016. Juno’s principal goal is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter.
The Juno Mission will enhance our knowledge of Earth and help to understand the origin and evolution of the Earth in a significant manner:
- Jupiter got most of its mass from the dust that blew away from Sun. Its mass is twice the combined mass of all other bodies in the solar system.
- Studying the composition of Jupiter can unlock the knowledge about the heavy elements which are no longer in Earth’s system but were originally present.
- Unlike Earth, the solar winds could not blow away Jupiter’s hydrogen and helium because of its distance from the sun.
- Therefore Jupiter’s atmosphere is supposed to have evolved from a mechanism different from the process of ‘degassing’ which generally explains the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere.
- Hydrogen found in Jupiter got liquefied and formed large oceans because of the extreme atmospheric pressure.
Studying this will help to know how our atmospheric gases behaved during the evolution of Earth. Studying the effect of Jupiter’s gravity and magnetism on its moons and vice-versa will enhance our understanding of the Earth-Moon relationship.
In our solar system, Jupiter has the largest surface, biggest ocean, and strongest gravity and magnetism. Therefore the data fetched by the Juno mission will enhance our understanding of the origin and evolution of Earth.