(Photo courtesy of NASA)

An artist's rendering of the Juno spacecraft.

A University of Arizona researcher is on the science team getting ready to study Jupiter via the Juno spacecraft. Juno reached its target Monday night after traveling 1.7 billion miles.

UA planetary science professor William Hubbard was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to celebrate the spacecraft’s arrival at the planet. All ears were waiting for a signal that Juno’s engines had slowed the probe so it could enter Jupiter’s orbit.

Hubbard studies Jupiter’s gravity.

“I’m expecting we’re going to get over 20 of these passes which will add to our database," said Hubbard. "The way it works, is that basically each time you go around you sample a little bit different part of Jupiter and you get better resolution on the quantities you’ve already measured.”

It will be 53 days before the Juno spacecraft completes its first elliptical orbit and flies back over Jupiter’s poles. Juno will then complete a series of 14-day orbits with its instruments surveying a wide swath of the planet collecting data that may lead to theories about the planet’s formation.