Google Doodle Celebrates Juno's Jupiter Arrival

Google Doodle of Juno at Jupiter — Google posted a doodle celebrating the Juno spacecraft's successful July 4, 2016 arrival at Jupiter. (Image credit: Google)

The scientists and engineers behind NASA's Juno mission aren't the only ones cheering the spacecraft's successful arrival at Jupiter Monday (July 4).

Just minutes after Juno entered orbit around Jupiter late Monday night, Google's search page began showcasing a "doodle" celebrating the spaceflight accomplishment.

In the retro, highly pixelated doodle, the rotating Juno spacecraft forms the second "o" in Google, which looms above a rendering of Jupiter in the background. Six very happy figures jump up and down to the left of this scene, which also features old-school icons of clapping hands, party hats and flashing cameras.

Juno launched in August 2011 on a $1.1 billion mission to investigate the composition, interior structure and gravitational and magnetic fields of Jupiter. The probe's observations should reveal a great deal about how Jupiter — and, by extension, the solar system — formed and evolved, mission officials have said.

The spacecraft's current path takes it around Jupiter once every 53 days. Juno will perform another burn in October that reduces its orbital period to 14 days. The probe will then begin its main science mission, scrutinizing Jupiter with nine different instruments through February 2018, when Juno will end its life with an intentional death dive into the planet's thick atmosphere.

Google has a history of posting astronomy and spaceflight-related doodles. For example, recent doodles have celebrated the discovery of liquid water on Mars, the New Horizons spacecraft's historic 2015 flyby of Pluto and the Rosetta mission's unprecedented landing on a comet in late 2014.

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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.