The US space agency plans to launch next week a solar-powered spacecraft called Juno that will journey to the gassy planet of Jupiter in search of how the huge, stormy giant was formed.
The $1.1 billion unmanned orbiter is scheduled for launch on August 5 -- 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.
With its fiery red eye and a mass greater than all planets in the solar system combined, excluding the Sun, Jupiter is intriguing to astronomers because it is believed to be the first planet that took shape around the Sun.
"After the Sun formed, it got the majority of the leftovers," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator and scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
"And that is why it is very interesting to us -- if we want to go back in time and understand where we came from and how the planets were made, Jupiter holds this secret," he said.
"So we want to know that ingredient list. What we are really after is discovering the recipe for making planets."
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 Bolton.
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