TITUSVILLE, Fla., April 11 (UPI) -- NASA says its unmanned Juno spacecraft is in Florida for final preparations ahead of its launch on a mission to study Jupiter.
The solar-powered spacecraft, which will orbit Jupiter to collect data on the planet's origins, structure and atmosphere, arrived in Florida last week from Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, a release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said.
Juno was removed from its packing container Saturday at an ultra-clean climate-controlled room at the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Fla., Saturday to begin functional testing.
"It looks exactly the same as we left it," Tim Gasparrini, Lockheed Martin's Juno program manager, told Spaceflightnow.com. "That's a great feeling."
NASA says it is aiming for an Aug. 5-26 launch window for the mission that has been eight years in planning.
"The Juno spacecraft and the team have come a long way since this project was first conceived in 2003," Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said.
"We're only a few months away from a mission of discovery that could very well rewrite the books on not only how Jupiter was born, but how our solar system came into being."
