On February 28, 2007, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on its ultimate journey to Pluto. This flyby gave scientists a unique opportunity to study Jupiter using the package of instruments available on New Horizons, while coordinating observations from both space- and ground-based telescopes including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Just days before nations around the world were set to begin a coordinated global research campaign called the International Polar Year (IPY); scientists at the South Pole aimed a massive new telescope at Jupiter and successfully collected the instrument's first test observations.

While NASA and the European Space Agency focus on Mars rovers and future missions to search for life on the Red Planet, a determined core of scientists is lobbying for equal attention to a place they feel is just as likely to harbor life - Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

As NASA develops its next "flagship" mission to the outer solar system, Jupiter's enigmatic moon Europa should be the target, says Arizona State University professor Ronald Greeley. Although Europa lies five times farther from the Sun than Earth, he notes it may offer a home for life.

Yogi Berra supposedly suggested that when you come to a fork in the road, you are supposed to take it.
That's just what planetary scientists studying the rich data set from the Galileo Mission to the outer solar system are doing now. They're taking the fork.

Inside Jupiter's and Saturn's magnetospheres, new ions form when neutral particles are ionized by the Sun's energy, electron impacts, and charge exchange.

Just a year after it was dispatched on the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the APL-built New Horizons spacecraft is on the doorstep of the solar system's largest planet - about to swing past Jupiter and pick up even more speed on its voyage toward the unexplored regions of the planetary frontier.

Gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn form soon after their stars do, according to new research.