At a Glance

Scientists and engineers from NASA's Juno mission answered Reddit users' questions in a special AMA on Tuesday.Juno successfully entered Jupiter's orbit on Monday after 5 years in transit. Experts shared what they most looked forward to discovering about our solar system's gas giant.

NASA celebrated a momentous event this week when the Juno spacecraft . It's our solar system's largest planet, yet so many mysteries remain. As the NASA scientists made history, they took a moment to hop on Reddit for .

From measuring water in the atmosphere to mapping Jupiter's magnetic field and all the uncharted territory in between, the scientists shared what they most looked forward to finding out on the Juno mission.

"I'm most interested in finding out what lurks beneath Jupiter's clouds," Stephanie Smith, NASA-JPL's social media said. "It's mind-blowing to think that we don't yet know what the interior is of the largest planet in the solar system. Is it rocky? Is it metallic? We just don't know. But that's exciting, and it's why we explore."

Steve Levin, a project scientist on the Juno mission, said he is excited about measuring how much water is on Jupiter.

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"The amount on Jupiter should tell us a lot about how and where the planet formed," Levin said. "The leading theory right now involves large chunks of ice initially, possibly with the planet drifting inward after initially forming much farther from the sun."

Discovering how Jupiter formed could also shed light on the origins of our own planet.

"Our understanding of how solar systems form is in some chaos (pun intended) due to all the exoplanets we're finding," Jared Espley, a Juno program scientist, said. "Understanding when and where Jupiter formed (e.g. by looking at the water abundances) will help us understand when and where Earth formed with respect to our sun."

Redditors also asked about the technical side of sending a probe that far into space. Levin explained that Juno's commands were queued up well before sending the spacecraft into deep space, but said that occasionally, they will send commands in real time.

"Right now, it would take a bit more than 45 minutes for a command to reach Juno," Levin said.

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The Juno mission was more than 15 years in the making, from the initial discussion to the first proposal to the history-making moment when the spacecraft reached Jupiter after 5 years in transit. For its first orbit, it will take Juno 53 days to go around the planet. Then, Espley says, the plan is to lower the spacecraft into a 14-day orbit.

And after Juno's mission is complete, the probe will make a plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere and it will be destroyed in the deorbit process.

But Juno's demise is far from anyone's mind now that we have the opportunity to finally peer behind the gaseous curtains of such an enormous and mysterious planet.

Being the first time a probe has ever entered the orbit of a planet of that size, the scientists are already learning all kinds of things.

And of course, there are the planet's moons, particularly Europa, which . While this mission's focus is on Jupiter's interior, the probe will take some photos of Europa, perhaps inspiring a future mission to study that moon.

When asked what could be the most groundbreaking thing Juno could find, senior research scientist Glenn Orton put it best:

"The standard answer would be the structure and composition of the interior of the planet," he said. "But in reality it would be something utterly unexpected."

MORE ON WEATHER.COM: 10 Things To Know About the Juno Mission

Juno's mission is to get a glimpse of the of Jupiter's surface through the planet's cloud-socked atmosphere and map the interior from a unique vantage point above the poles. Some questions NASA hopes to answer: How much water exists? Is there a solid core? Why are Jupiter's southern and northern lights the brightest in the solar system?