“Juno, welcome to Jupiter,” a ground controller announced at 4.53am BST today. “Congratulations to all of us,” Scott Bolton, the $1.1 billion mission’s principal investigator, told… Then came the signal they had waited for, sent from 504 million miles away, and the news they had worked for ten years to achieve. Juno will fly closer to Jupiter than its predecessor Galileo, sending huge amounts of data back to Earth Nasa/EPAThe mission control room erupted into applause, cheers and several minutes of back-slapping. Jubilant scenes from Nasa’s Juno team, who celebrated their success in the closing moments of US Independence Day yesterday Robyn Beck/GettyThere was an anxious hush as the numbers ticked down on computer screens at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, plotting the Juno spacecraft’s progress as it edged towards a rendezvous with the solar system’s most formidable planet.

Source: The Times July 05, 2016 07:52 UTC