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Following an epic five year journey, the Juno probe successfully entered Jupiter's orbit in the early hours of this morning.

It successfully performed "orbit insertion burn" manoeuvre at 04:18 BST on Tuesday, July 5 that lasted for 35 minutes. It slowed the probe down enough that it was captured by the gas giant's gravitational pull.

Now NASA will let Juno complete two, 53-day orbits around Jupiter before it moves on to the next phase of the mission in October.

(Image: NASA)

That will settle the craft into a 14-day polar orbit during which Juno's many instruments will provide exciting new information about Jupiter, including clues about how the enormous gaseous planet formed.

What will Juno tell us?

Juno aims to reveal more of the solar system's largest and oldest planet's secrets.

Named after the Roman god, Jupiter is a gas giant composed mainly of hydrogen and helium with a mass two and half times that of the solar system's other planets combined.

Juno is the eighth probe to visit Jupiter, and is equipped to sense what is going on below the planets thick clouds.

(Image: NASA)

In fact, that's why it's called Juno. In Roman mythology, mischievous god Jupiter used a veil of clouds to hide his naughtiness. But his wife, Juno, was able to peer through his weird mist and see Jupiter's true nature.

Rather than revealing an irritating husband, NASA's Juno hopes to reveal Jupiter's origin story. A key goal is to measure the abundance of water in the planet's atmosphere.

This will help scientists understand Jupiter's formation, which will in turn tell us about more about the origins of the whole solar system.

Another key goal is to measure the mass of the planet's core, which Juno will achieve by mapping gravitational and magnetic fields. This will hopefully tell us whether the planet has a solid middle.

The probe will also measure atmospheric composition, temperature, structure and dynamics, as well as characterising the planet's stunning auroras.

The mission will end with Juno being burnt up in the Jovian atmosphere.

This is intentional, and will ensure that the probe does not crash into Europa, one of Jupiter's moons.

Europa is considered to have an environment that could harbour microbial life, and Juno could contaminate that pristine environment, which would ruin NASA's future plans to investigate life on the icy moon.

Juno is an 'armoured tank'

The $1.1 billion dollar mission launched from Cape Canaveral in August 2011 and is planned to run until February 2018, or as long as the probe can survive Jupiter's incredibly harsh environment.

(Image: NASA)

Speaking to the BBC about the brutal conditions for the probe, principal investigator Scott Bolton from the Southwest Research Institute in Texas said: "Everything about Jupiter is extreme; it's a planet on steroids."

(Image: NASA)

"Everything about it is 'the most'. So, it has the harshest radiation of any planetary environment in the entire Solar System; it has the strongest magnetic field; it's spinning around incredibly fast."

"We have to deal with this environment, and the spacecraft is literally an armoured tank."

He's not lying. The "Juno Radiation Vault" is a 1 cm thick suit of titanium armour that is designed to protect the probe's sensitive electronics from the intense Jovian radiation.

"Without its protective shield" Bolton says on the NASA website, "Juno's brain would get fried on the very first pass near Jupiter."

(Image: NASA)

The huge planet has an enormous magnetic field that traps and accelerates particles almost to the speed of light. This generates equatorial 'radiation belts' that could eventually destroy Juno's electronics.

To partially mitigate the effects of the radiation belts, the probe will enter a 14-day polar orbit to avoid the worst of the radiation.