
Mission Juno
NASA's Juno probe launches on August 5, 2011, on a five-year run to Jupiter, and this compilation of short clips follows the mission from planning through arrival. On October 9, Juno swings back past Earth for a gravity-assist flyby, using the planet's pull to add speed before the long coast outward, and the probe reaches Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Scientists and engineers who built and fly the spacecraft explain its instruments one by one, from the radiation-hardened vault protecting its electronics to the cameras and sensors meant to peer through the planet's clouds toward its core. Computer-generated animation stands in for footage no camera could capture, showing the solar-powered probe's orbit and the slingshot maneuver in motion. The material was assembled from roughly a hundred short segments originally released separately, so pacing and tone shift as it goes, sometimes slowing into detail dense enough to skim. What holds it together is the mission's basic question: what Jupiter's origin and structure can tell us about how the solar system itself formed.