7 Things You Need To Know About NASA's Big Jupiter Mission

5. What Are We Hoping To Find Out?

For such a socking great planet, we know very little about Jupiter.

We don't, for instance, know whether it has a rocky core, or whether it's just gas all the way through. This is one of the things that Juno hopes to discover as it peels back the stormy outer layers of the planet's atmosphere. The probe is actually named after the Roman goddess Juno, the wife of Jupiter, who also had the ability to see through clouds (clever bunch, that NASA lot).

Speaky of storms, one of Jupiter's most iconic yet mysterious features, is the Great Red Spot. We've been keeping an eye on this swirling vortex for hundreds of years now, and we're still no closer to really figuring it out. One thing we do know is that it's big (here's a cheeky comparison with the Earth for context) and it's old - possibly raging through the atmosphere for more than 351 years. We also know that it's shrinking and changing colour.

This is all very well, but we're not entirely sure how or why, so getting a proper look at it with the help of Juno could be just what we need to crack the mystery.