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Other Planets
This site is being developed to provide current and useful information and educational materials for Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. These three gas giants presently do not have dedicated observational spacecraft.
What about Saturn?
Cassini is currently in the midst of a two year extended Equinox Mission to explore the Saturn system having just completed its initial four-year mission. Cassini has been approved a mission plan for a seven year extended-extended mission (XXM) - also known as the Solstice Mission - that would continue explorations of the Saturn system until 2017. -
Neptune
First planet to be predicted to exist by Urbain Leverrier and John Adams and then discovered following a search by Johan Galle in 1845, Neptune was the last solar system target for Voyager 2 which came to within 5,000 km above its clouds on 24 August 1989.
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Uranus
First planet to be discovered based by Herschel.on 13th of March in 1781 while measuring parallax of stars.
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Jupiter
First visited in 1973 by Pioneer 10, an unmanned spacecraft, the giant planet's first close-up images were captured using the spin-scan imaging technique originally developed by V. Suomi and R. Parent in 1967 to image the Earth from ATS-I satellite . Pioneer 10 was followed by its twin, Pioneer 11 which also went on to visit Saturn in 1978. The Pioneers were soon followed by Voyagers 1 and 2, both part of the Mariner Jupiter Saturn (MJS) program. Voyager 2 was later targeted to visit Uranus in 1986 and then Neptune in 1989.
The first dedicated spacecraft to observe Jupiter was the Galileo Orbiter. The Galileo mission also deployed a probe to enter the atmosphere, the first and the only instrumented probe so far to explore a giant planet's atmosphere.View a collection of amateur images of Jupiter here
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Housed at & staffed by:
{ Science Content: L. Sromovsky + S. Limaye } { Outreach Lead: R. Pertzborn } { Web
Design: H. Y. Pi }
{ Contact Us: juno[at]ssec.wisc.edu } { Last update:
August 23, 2011
}