Juno is IN Orbit

Congratulations to NASA, Lockheed Martin and the many folks who are part of the Juno mission to Jupiter. Tonight the spacecraft fired its rockets and slipped easily into Jupiter orbit, beginning the next phase of Jupiter exploration!

Following a 2,102-second long burn (1 second off the predicted time) the spacecraft officially “arrived” at Jupiter. It turned to face the Sun and has headed out on its first Jupiter orbit.

I wrote about Juno a few days ago, but it’s still pretty amazing to be watching this in real time via computer simulations and Webcast.  If anybody had told me back when I was first covering missions that I’d be in the comfort of my office, watching as a spacecraft slipped into orbit around Jupiter, I wouldn’t have believed them! But here we are, and there Juno is.  Now, stay tuned for the next several days and weeks as this as this mission starts returning images and data of the King of the Planets!