Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division, NASA, left, talks during a media briefing joined by Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator, second from left, Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager, second... (Associated Press) 
 
 PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — The Latest on NASA's mission to Jupiter (all times local): 
 
 8:52 p.m. 
 
 A solar-powered spacecraft is circling Jupiter on a mission to map the giant planet from the inside out. 
 
 NASA mission control received a radio signal Monday night from the Juno spacecraft confirming that it's in orbit around the biggest planet in the solar system. 
 
 Because Juno's camera and other instruments were turned off during the highly anticipated arrival, there won't be pictures of the key moment. 
 
 The trip took nearly five years and 1.8 billion miles (2.8 billion kilometers). Juno is the first spacecraft to venture so far from Earth powered by the sun. 
 
 It'll spend 20 months circling Jupiter's poles, peering through thick clouds and studying the planet's gravity and magnetic fields. 
 
 8:18 p.m. 
 
 A NASA spacecraft has begun firing its rocket motor in preparation for its arrival at Jupiter. 
 
 The space agency said Monday the engine burn is expected to last about half an hour. It's designed to slow the Juno spacecraft down so that it can slip into orbit around the giant planet. 
 
 Mission controllers can't send any commands during this key moment because Juno is on autopilot. Its camera and other instruments were also powered off as a precaution. 
 
 Juno traveled nearly five years and 1.8 billion miles (2.8 billion kilometers) to the outer solar system. Its goal is to peek behind Jupiter's swirling clouds and explore its gravity and magnetic fields. 
 
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 11:35 a.m. 
 
 After a nearly five-year journey, a solar-powered spacecraft is passing Jupiter's inner moons as it readies for the closest encounter with the biggest planet in the solar system. 
 
 NASA's Juno spacecraft will fire its main rocket engine late Monday to slow itself down from a speed of 150,000 mph (250,000 kph) and slip into orbit around Jupiter. 
 
 Juno chief scientist Scott Bolton said at a morning briefing that the spacecraft is expected to survive rings of debris and a hostile radiation environment because it's "built like an armored tank." 
 
 NASA released a series of images taken last week during the approach, showing the destination planet glowing yellow in the distance, circled by its four inner moons. 
 
 Scientists have promised close-up views of Jupiter when Juno skims the cloud tops during the 20-month, $1.1 billion mission. ||||| CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - NASA’s Juno spacecraft capped a five-year journey to Jupiter late Monday with a do-or-die engine burn to sling itself into orbit, setting the stage for a 20-month dance around the biggest planet in the solar system to learn how and where it formed. 
 
 “We’re there. We’re in orbit. We conquered Jupiter,” lead mission scientist Scott Bolton, with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, told reporters on Tuesday. “Now the fun begins.” 
 
 Juno will spend the next three months getting into position to begin studying what lies beneath Jupiter’s thick clouds and mapping the planet’s gargantuan magnetic fields. 
 
 Flying in egg-shaped orbits, each one lasting 14 days, Juno also will look for evidence that Jupiter has a dense inner core and measure how much water is in the atmosphere, a key yardstick for figuring out how far away from the sun the gas giant formed. 
 
 Jupiter’s origins, in turn, affected the development and position of the rest of the planets, including Earth and its fortuitous location conducive to the evolution of life. 
 
 “The question I’ve had my whole life that I’m hoping we get an answer to is ‘How’d we get here?’ That’s really pretty fundamental to me,” Bolton said. 
 
 Jupiter orbits five times farther from the sun than Earth, but it may have started out elsewhere and migrated, jostling its smaller sibling planets as it moved. 
 
 Jupiter’s immense gravity also diverts many asteroids and comets from potentially catastrophic collisions with Earth and the rest of the inner solar system. 
 
 NASA's Juno spacecraft obtained this color view at a distance of 6.8 million miles (10.9 million kilometers) from Jupiter, on June 21, 2016. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Handout via Reuters 
 
 Launched from Florida nearly five years ago, Juno needed to be precisely positioned, ignite its main engine at exactly the right time and keep it firing for 35 minutes to become only the second spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. 
 
 If anything had gone even slightly awry, Juno would have sailed helplessly past Jupiter, unable to complete a $1 billion mission. 
 
 The risky maneuver began as planned at 11:18 p.m. EDT as Juno soared through the vacuum of space at more than 160,000 mph (257,500 kph). 
 
 NASA expects Juno to be in position for its first close-up images of Jupiter on Aug. 27, the same day its science instruments are turned on for a test run. 
 
 Only one other spacecraft, Galileo, has ever circled Jupiter, which is itself orbited by 67 known moons. Bolton said Juno is likely to discover even more. 
 
 Seven other U.S. space probes have sailed past the gas giant on brief reconnaissance missions before heading elsewhere in the solar system. 
 
 The risks to the spacecraft are not over. Juno will fly in highly elliptical orbits that will pass within 3,000 miles (4,800 km) of the tops of Jupiter’s clouds and inside the planet’s powerful radiation belts. 
 
 Juno’s computers and sensitive science instruments are housed in a 400-pound (180-kg) titanium vault for protection. But during its 37 orbits around Jupiter, Juno will be exposed to the equivalent of 100 million dental X-rays, said Bill McAlpine, radiation control manager for the mission. 
 
 Slideshow (2 Images) 
 
 The spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, is expected to last for 20 months. On its final orbit, Juno will dive into Jupiter’s atmosphere, where it will be crushed and vaporized. 
 
 Like Galileo, which circled Jupiter for eight years before crashing into the planet in 2003, Juno’s demise is designed to prevent any hitchhiking microbes from Earth from inadvertently contaminating Jupiter’s ocean-bearing moon Europa, a target of future study for extraterrestrial life. ||||| Skip Ad Ad Loading... x Embed x Share NASA's Juno probe successfully enters Jupiters orbit, a moment that engineers said was 'make or break' for the mission. 
 
 From left to right, Geoffrey Yoder, Michael Watkins, Rick Nybakken, Richard Cook and Jan Chodas celebrate in Mission Control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the solar-powered Juno spacecraft goes into orbit around Jupiter on Monday in Pasadena, Calif. (Photo: Ringo H.W. Chiu, AP) 
 
 PASADENA, Calif. — The best celebration this Independence Day wasn’t around a barbecue or fireworks show, but in a dark room filled with NASA engineers. 
 
 After hours of anticipation, team members broke out in cheers. The Juno mission's spacecraft made it into Jupiter's orbit just before 9 p.m. local time after a risky maneuver to slow it down by more than 1,200 mph so it could be captured by Jupiter’s gravity. 
 
 "NASA did it again," said Scott Bolton, the scientist in charge of the Juno project, in a news conference afterward at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the mission is being directed. 
 
 Rick Nybakken, a Juno project manager, said it was a "make-or-break" moment for Juno's five-year-old, 1.8 billion mile journey through space. 
 
 @NASAJuno's engineers say burn was accurate to within 1 second of flight plan. Next step: turn solar panels to sun pic.twitter.com/aOoPLVvjHV — Michael Kofsky (@Michael_Kofsky) July 5, 2016 
 
 Juno will now take a series of risky dives beneath Jupiter’s intense radiation belts where it will study the gas giant from as close as 2,600 miles over the planet's cloud tops. The last mission to the gas giant, Galileo, which ended in 2003, spent most of its mission five times farther away than Juno will get. 
 
 The aim of the mission is to collect data about how the solar system formed. 
 
 Going beneath the radiation belts to collect data involves some risks. Juno’s close approaches will expose it to enough radiation to fry most modern electronics, so the craft will dip in just once every two weeks for a few hours to minimize exposure. Juno is also outfitted with a radiation-shielded titanium vault that houses most of its sensitive equipment. 
 
 The sensitive maneuver known as orbital insertion required extreme precision. It involved firing a rocket engine to slow Juno down. 
 
 If it hadn’t worked, Juno could have ended up flying off into space at speeds too great to ever return. 
 
 “You’ve gotta fire the engine at exactly the right time in exactly the right place. That’s not easy,” said Guy Beutelschies, director of Interplanetary Missions at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, the NASA contractor that built the spacecraft. 
 
 In the end, Juno followed the flight plan almost exactly, accurate to within one second. 
 
 The mood at the news press conference an hour later was one of celebration and relief. 
 
 "(We're all) going to bed tonight not worrying about what’s gonna happen tomorrow, it’s pretty amazing,” said Diane Brown, an executive for the Juno program. 
 
 “Juno is going to just skim the top of Jupiter…so we’ll be able to learn so much more. What’s it made of? What’s the atmosphere? How did it originate?” said Brown. 
 
 “We prepared a contingency communications procedure and guess what?” said Nybakken, who then ripped up the contingency plans in front of the cameras. 
 
 Skip Ad Ad Loading... x Embed x Share This video released by NASA shows the view from the Juno spacecraft as it approaches the Jupiter system. The planet's moons can be seen orbiting the gas giant. 
 
 A rendering of NASA's Juno spacecraft at Jupiter. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech) 
 
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– After spending five years traveling to Jupiter, NASA's Juno probe entered the gas giant's orbit Monday night by executing a make-or-break maneuver that was accurate within a second. Team members at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory cheered as they received confirmation that the spacecraft had fired its main engines after a 1.8-billion-mile journey, slowing itself down enough to be captured by Jupiter's gravity after surviving the trip through radiation bands and fields of debris, USA Today reports. "Juno, welcome to Jupiter," said mission control commentator Jennifer Delavan of Lockheed Martin, per the AP. Juno project manager Rick Nybakken gleefully ripped up papers to celebrate the flawless maneuver. "We prepared a contingency communications procedure, and guess what?" he said. "We don't need that anymore." The spacecraft, which is only the second to ever orbit Jupiter, will spend the next 20 months making a total of 37 orbits to give scientists an unprecedented look at the planet and its atmosphere, reports Reuters. Two 53-day orbits will be followed by dozens of 14-day orbits. Researchers hope to unlock mysteries such as the amount of water in the planet's atmosphere and the presence of metallic hydrogen. The substance is believed to exist in large amounts deep inside Jupiter, but scientists have been completely unable to re-create it on Earth, the New York Times reports in a look at what to expect from the Juno mission, which will conclude with a "suicidal dive" into Jupiter on Feb. 20, 2018, to eliminate the possibility of the probe crashing into the moon Europa and contaminating it with microbes from Earth.