Juno fires its engine for 35 minutes and slips into orbit around Jupiter

Five years after launch and 2.8 billion kilometers of travel, NASA's Juno spacecraft reached its destination on July 5, 2016. The probe fired its main engine for 2,102 seconds, slowing itself by 542 meters per second to slip into Jupiter's polar orbit, a critical maneuver that determined whether Juno would successfully enter Jupiter's orbit. Juno became the first solar-powered spacecraft to operate at Jupiter, running on three massive panels instead of the plutonium generators every prior outer-planet mission had relied on. It was built to look past the clouds Jupiter has always hidden behind…