Mauk and colleagues at the Laurel lab developed their proposal for JEDI in 2003 and 2004. They had experience with similar instruments on Galileo and both Voyager missions, which flew by Jupiter in 1979 on their way to the outer reaches of the solar system. They also employed similarly designed instruments on the New Horizons mission, to see how the "solar wind" of charged particles from the sun influence Pluto, and the Van Allen Probes, two spacecraft launched in 2012 to measure belts of radiation surrounding Earth.