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6A Daily News – Friday, July 29, 2011 Jupiter mission a quest to find 'recipe for planet-making' LOS ANGELES (MCT) — Even for scientists versed in the grand scale of astronomy, it's never been easy to grasp the scope of Jupiter. After all, you could fit every piece of the solar sys- tem other than the sun inside Jupiter — all the other planets, moons and asteroids — with plenty of room to spare. Jupiter has cannibalized 20 moons over the years and still has at least 63, one bigger than Mercury. Jupiter's "spot" is actually a hurricane, which has lasted for hundreds of years and is more than twice the diameter of Earth. But Jupiter isn't just a forbidding ball of gas. Somewhere in there are the clues, scientists believe, to the origin of the solar sys- tem — and Earth. Starting the morning of Aug. 5, NASA will enter the launch period for the spacecraft Juno, which will begin an unprecedented exploration of Jupiter's profound secrets. "We are after the recipe for planet-making. To get the list of ingredients — this is the place," said Scott Bolton, the mission's princi- pal investigator and the director of space science at San Antonio's Southwest Research Institute. Roughly four and a half billion years ago, the sun formed when a giant cloud of gas and dust collapsed under its own gravity. The sun sucked up virtually all of it, but there were left- overs. Those leftovers formed the solar system, and most of them wound up inside Jupiter. Unlike other planets that shed their elements over time and undergo sweeping change, Jupiter's sheer girth has allowed it to retain most of its original features. Con- tained inside, said William Hubbard, a University of Arizona professor of plane- tary sciences and one of the mission's top scientists, is a record, essentially, of the birth of the planets. "It ties right back to us," Bolton said. "These are the elements of life, the ele- ments that Earth is made out of. How Jupiter managed to get enriched in these ele- ments is right at the essence of how we got here. Where did we come from? That's what it comes down to." Juno can launch any time during a 22-day peri- od, hitching a ride on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Juno's solar panels, con- figured like three spokes of a Ferris wheel, will supply power to the craft as it jour- neys across 1.8 billion miles of space. The trip will take five years. By the fall of 2017, Juno is expected to have completed 34 ellipti- cal, polar orbits around Jupiter. Its task complete, Juno will then be plunged, in a final hurrah, into Jupiter's depths, where it will disintegrate. The Jet Propulsion Lab- oratory in La Canada Flintridge, Calif., is manag- ing the $1.1 billion mission. With the recent end of the space shuttle program, NASA has faced questions about an approach to manned space exploration that critics have called aim- less. On the other hand, this year marks a bustling period in unmanned exploration, particularly on deep-space missions. Juno's launch will follow NASA's Dawn spacecraft neath Jupiter's massive bands of gas. That discov- ery will help to reveal the timeline of the formation of the solar system. If Jupiter has no core, then it probably formed as the sun did — by inhaling, in a sense, during a gravita- tional instability. If Jupiter does have a solid core, then its rocky elements would have needed time to form before being surrounded by the bands of gas that circle the planet. Despite those potential leaps — and though scien- tists have dreamed of study- ing Jupiter at this level of detail since the 1970s — Juno was, for many years, not a sure thing. Spacecraft dating back to Pioneer 10 in the early 1970s have studied Jupiter, "but just kind of looking out the car window," said Jan Chodas, a JPL engineer and the Juno project manager. Jupiter's hostile environ- ment, particularly its crip- pling doses of radiation, was an impediment. arriving into orbit around the protoplanet Vesta, the first prolonged encounter with an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. In September, twin spacecraft will lift off to fly in coordinated orbits around the moon. That project is expected to yield the most complete gravitational map of the moon and also help scientists understand the origins of the Earth. Also this fall, the new Mars rover, Curiosity, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, and is expected to continue the search for water and evi- dence of life. "In all the time I've been working, I can't think of one time that has had so many launches, so fast," said Bolton, who was a scientist at JPL from 1980 until 2005. "It's an exciting time." Juno's orbits have been spaced with precision to cover the entire planet. The result, scientists believe, will be the first comprehen- sive mapping of Jupiter's gravitational and magnetic fields. Scientists will also be able to determine whether there is a solid core under- Juno, too, will be sub- jected to an enormous amount of radiation _ the equivalent of 100 million dental X-rays. That level of radiation can fry a space- craft's electronics in an instant, and was among the reasons that Jupiter mis- sions were initially passed over in NASA competitions to obtain launch approval. Then, in the late 1990s, Bolton was working on Cassini-Huygens, the first spacecraft to go into orbit around Saturn. One morning — after spending the previous day in a series of meetings about measuring radiation in deep space — Bolton was stand- ing in the shower. He had an epiphany of instruments that would yield the first solid reading of water and oxygen on Jupiter. 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