Welcome to Jupiter - NASA's Juno spacecraft makes it to Jupiterorbit!

I believe that Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote that because he knew human nature. Forbid us to do something, and that’s the first thing we want to do.

Every mission has its unique challenges. But for anyone who works on space hardware, Juno’s Jupiter insertion is truly cringe-worthy, because it’s a highly time-critical maneuver done in an extremely high radiation environment. Earth-orbiting satellites usually avoid doing any critical maneuvers when going through the South Atlantic Anomaly, because radiation can cause computers to glitch. Jupiter’s radiation environment is orders of magnitude stronger, and Juno had to perform the most critical maneuver right in the middle of it. If the insertion burn had failed, Juno would not have gone into orbit around Jupiter - instead it would have flown on, never to return to Jupiter again. And because of the time lag, everything must happen autonomously - by the time the people on the ground found out something went wrong, it would be too late to do anything about it.

I think the Curiosity EDL (entry, descent and landing) on Mars was at least as difficult. It didn’t have radiation to contend with, but it involved many mechanisms that had to work perfectly on first try.

Sending a probe to Uranus is just asking for lots of juvenile scatological humor… yet despite that, there was some talk not too long ago about sending an orbiter there. I gusss what it was was a concept study. It’s probably not gone any further yet.

I’m sure it would have been the butt of a lot of jokes.

Speaking of jokes, I think I remember seeing the observation that most of the moons of Jupiter were named after the lovers of Jupiter.

Now the wife has come, finally keeping an eye on the cheating cad.

The first time solar power has been used so far from Earth. Funny I thought beyond Mars the use of solar panels was not possible.

Solar panels have gotten better, and electronics are happier with less juice these days. And on the gripping hand, there is a shortage of the correct flavor of Plutonium.
See what happens when you unplanet something?

Well, Juno is about as wide as a basketball court and most of it is solar panels. There isn’t a lot of solar energy out that far.

Dawn has solar panels and it’s out at Ceres, about twice as far as Mars. Both Juno and Dawn use multi-junction solar cells that are about twice as efficient as the kind you’d put on your roof. Even so, the panels on Juno are larger than any space probe has had before. That’s because at Jupiter, the Sun is only 1/25th as bright as it is at Earth orbit.

Jupiter is only 5 times further from the sun than the earth. Sunlight is about 1/25 as bright as at earth, but that’s still a lot of light - it’s brighter than an overcast day on earth.

Obligatory xkcd reference.