Glimpses Of The Gas Giant

History was made on July 4th as the Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit.  And just a few days ago the spacecraft sent back its first image of our solar system’s largest planet. The color image shows Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and three of the planet’s four moons - Io, Europa and Ganymede (pictured left to right in the NASA image included in this post). 

At Couragion we are especially interested in this event because one of our wonderful role models, Sibel Clark, was part of making the mission possible!  We blogged about Sibel’s work earlier this year - when Juno was in route to Jupiter. Sibel is a software engineer and had the honor of writing the code that enables the Juno spacecraft to ‘talk’ to the scientific instruments that will capture data during the Juno mission.

Sibel’s Couragion Career Quest is one of the most popular among our users. Getting a glimpse into Sibel’s career is truly inspiring to kids and helps them see the applicability of their coursework. Here are a few of the verbatim comments that students have written after completing Sibel’s Couragion Career Quest:

• “Being able to send your work into space would be the coolest thing ever!”

• “This sounds very, very, very cool and it makes me want do it.”

• “This is one of the coolest jobs ever!”

• “This is very interesting for me because I love science.”

We love that space exploration and Sibel’s Career Quest are inspiring the next generation of STEM workers. We are grateful to Sibel for sharing her story with Couragion users and we’d like to congratulate Sibel and the rest of the Juno team for reaching these major mission milestones! To follow Juno’s progress, check out NASA’s website.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1660021. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.