OT: Juno now in orbit around Jupiter

While we were all snarfing hot dogs / bbq / brots etc., the NASA spacecraft "Juno" successfully entered Jovian orbit (meaning, around Jupiter).  Juno travelled for 5 years, over 1.7 billion miles, and this evening fired its engines for 35 minutes. Juno will now spend about 2 years studying Jupiter, in a HIGHLY elliptical orbit -- it will take 58 days to make one orbit, which at its farthest point will be hundreds of thousands of miles from Jupiter, but at its closest point will be only 2600 miles above the top of the atmosphere.

Juno will try to figure out what is deep inside Jupitor's thick clouds; we don't know if it has a solid surface (probably doesn't), or just a really thick, gooey surface deep inside, or molten metals etc.  We don't know why it has such a powerful magnetic field ("magnetosphere"), or how much water is in its atmosphere.  It was probably the first planet to form, and could explain how all the planets formed.

Juno is the farthest-out solar-powered vehicle in history.  The Sun's rays are really weak out at Jupiter, so Juno has three massive solar arrays -- end to end, it's bigger than a basketball court.  Juno also has a "vault" to protect its electronic equipment, because Jupiter is incredibly radioactive.  (How radioactive?  IIRC, a human, exposed to certain parts of it, would die in 10 minutes.)

Juno cost over $1 billion, or about the cost of the Warriors' starting lineup I think.