Space exploration is enjoying something of a golden age. Thousands tweeted, blogged and watched online in 2015 as nasa's New Horizons probe sped past Pluto, beaming back the first close-up pictures of that tiny, distant planetoid. The fate of Philae, a robot dropped onto a comet by the European Space Agency in 2014, and which ended up far adrift from its intended landing zone, filled the headlines. The next planet to host a robot explorer will be Jupiter. On July 4th a nasa probe called Juno will arrive in orbit after a five-year journey from Earth. It will be the first craft to visit the planet since Galileo, which arrived in 1995 and plunged into the Jovian atmosphere at the end of its mission in 2003. Juno's job is to investigate the history of the solar system's biggest planet.
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