Solar-powered spacecraft Juno will be launched for a five-year journey to Jupiter for research, according to NASA reports on Sunday. Its trip to Jupiter, set to begin on August 5 when the launch window opens at 11:34 am (1534 GMT) -- the start of a five-year odyssey toward the solar system's most massive planet in the hopes that it will be able to circle Jupiter for a period of a year.
Juno aims to get closer to Jupiter than any other NASA spacecraft and will be the first to undertake a polar orbit of the planet, said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator and scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

When it gets there Juno will make use of a series of instruments, some of which were provided by European space agency partners Italy, Belgium and France, to learn about the workings of the planet and what is inside.

Two key experiments are to gauge how much water is in Jupiter and whether the planet "has a core of heavy elements at the center, or whether it is just gas all the way down," said Bolton.

Scientists also hope to learn more about Jupiter's magnetic fields and its big red knot, a storm that has been raging for more than 300 years.

Juno then heads back toward Earth, "and we do a flyby of Earth of about 500 kilometers in October 2013, and then we slingshot ourselves out towards Jupiter arriving in July 2016," according to Jan Chodas, Juno project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Jim Green, director of the planetary science division at NASA headquarters in Washington, said Juno is part of a series of new planetary science missions, to be followed by Grail which is headed to the Moon in September and the Mars Science Laboratory set to take off in November. (Agencies)

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