Juno spacecraft completes halfway to Jupiter

The Juno Airship of the US Space and Aeronautics Agency (NASA) has reached a milestone in the solar system's five-year journey to the largest planet.

Launched on August 5, 2011, the Juno mission, with a cost of US $ 1.1 billion, passed half the way to Jupiter earlier this week.

Juno has just reached a milestone in the journey to Jupiter - Photo: scitechdaily.com)

'The Juno odometer has surpassed 9,464 space units , ' said Juno Scott Bolton, a mission leader at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio (USA).

'The whole team is looking forward and preparing to the day we enter the orbit of the largest solar system planet,' Bolton expert said.

The space unit is defined as the distance of the sun - Earth, at 149,597,870.7 km.

Unit 9,464 is equivalent to 1,415,794,248km.

It is expected that Juno will come to Jupiter on July 4, 2016. When entering orbit around Jupiter, the spacecraft will revolve around the planet in 33 rounds, from one extreme to the other, and use a set of 8 observations underneath its strange cloud.