How You Can Watch JPL’s Juno Spacecraft Arrive at Jupiter

After a journey of almost five years, NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter on the Fourth of July. From Thursday, June 30 through July 4, Pasadena residents would be able to follow the arrival with a series of briefings by NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory inside Caltech, or watch the events online.

News briefings and live coverage will be held at JPL and aired live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

The Fourth of July will be the day when Juno performs a suspenseful orbit insertion maneuver – a 35-minute burn of its main engine – to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour, so that it can be captured into the gas giant’s orbit.

Once in the planet’s orbit, Juno will circle the Jovian world 37 times during 20 months, skimming to within 3,100 miles above the cloud tops. This will be the first time a spacecraft will orbit the poles of Jupiter, providing new answers to ongoing mysteries about the planet’s core, composition and magnetic fields.

NASA last did an events briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC, and then moved the briefings to Pasadena, starting Thursday. Subsequent briefings will be within the walls of JPL, especially when Juno starts approaching the Jupiter landscape.

Thursday’s Mission overview news briefing at JPL will happen at 10 a.m., followed by a Mission outreach briefing at 11 a.m.

On Monday, Orbit Insertion Day, a pre-orbit insertion briefing will start the day’s coverage activities at 9 a.m.

The actual orbit insertion will be aired starting at 7:30 p.m. with a NASA TV commentary. A post-orbit insertion briefing follows at 10 p.m. also at JPL.

People can watch all of these events online through www.nasa.gov/nasatv, www.ustream.tv/nasa, or www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2.

Live coverage on orbit insertion day also will be available online via Facebook Live at www.facebook.com/nasa or www.facebook.com/nasajpl.

JPL manages the Juno mission for NASA. The mission’s principal investigator is Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The mission is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft.

To learn more about the June mission, visit www.gov/juno and get an up-to-date schedule of events. Social media will also carry the coverage on www.facebook.com/NASAJuno and www.twitter.com/NASAJuno.