Either late last night or early today, depending on your earthbound time zone, the NASA spacecraft Juno went into orbit around Jupiter, after a five-year voyage from Earth. The craft's main engine was fired for 35 minutes to make the necessary reduction in velocity. Juno has become the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter since Galileo, which did so from 1995 to 2003. The orbit will take Juno as close as 2,600 miles from Jupiter's cloud tops. (Would that distance be called its "perijovion"?)
In Roman mythology, Juno was the wife of Jupiter. They were the respective equivalents of the Greek deities Hera and Zeus. There is also an asteroid named Juno.
Read more at CNN, USA Today, NBC News, BBC News and NASA's press release.
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