According to a news release from the University of Iowa, a tremendous amount of speed can be obtained through a well-executed slingshot maneuver. Because of this fact, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will be journeying within approximately 350 miles of Earth’s surface on Wednesday before it slingshots off into space on an investigation of Jupiter.

The exploration of the gas giant started with an August 2011 launch. The adventure will truly start when Juno finally turns up at Jupiter in July 2016. According to Bill Kurth, a University of Iowa research scientists and lead investigator for Juno’s Waves instrument, the two years Juno spent traveling outward beyond the orbit of Mars before swinging past the Earth gives the space probe that ability to journey to Jupiter.

“Juno will be really smoking as it passes Earth at a speed of about 25 miles per second relative to the sun. But it will need every bit of this speed to get to Jupiter for its July 4, 2016 capture into polar orbit about Jupiter,” notes Kurth. “The first half of its journey has been simply to set up this gravity assist with Earth.

“One of Juno’s activities during the Earth flyby will be to make a movie of the Earth-moon system that will be the first to show Earth spinning on its axis from a distance,” adds principal investigator Scott Bolton, from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

Kurth and colleagues point out that the real meat of the mission will start when the probe commences circling Jupiter some 33 times during the course of one year. In fact, Juno will be the first space probe to circle the gas giant over its poles. The highly eccentric orbit will move Juno from just above the cloud tops to an area approximately 1.72 million miles from Jupiter, every 11 days.

The Waves instrument will study a number of rare occurrences within Jupiter’s polar magnetosphere by determining radio and plasma waves. Eight other experiments will be conducted by Juno’s onboard instruments.

Juno will examine Jupiter’s northern and southern lights by traveling directly through the electrical current systems that produce them.

“Jupiter has the largest and most energetic magnetosphere, and to finally get an opportunity to study the nature of its auroras and the role radio and plasma waves play in their generation makes Juno a really exciting mission for me,” notes Kurth.

Scientists hope that Juno will help them learn more about the origin and development of the solar system’s gas giant by measuring the quantity of water and ammonia present in the atmosphere, examining the movement of the planet’s upper atmosphere and charting the planet’s magnetic and gravity field to gain more knowledge about its deep interior.

University of Iowa Professor Don Gurnett notes that the Juno probe and its highly eccentric orbit will add to Jupiter observations obtained by previous University of Iowa instruments.

After its one-year science mission, Juno will make a fiery entry into the gas giant’s atmosphere so that it doesn’t strike Europa and possibly bring microbes from Earth to that icy world.