Naukowcy liczą, że dane uzyskane z instrumentów pomiarowych Juno pomogą zrozumieć proces kształtowania się Ziemi, jak też podobnych planet we Wszechświecie.
Zadaniem Juno jest też dokonanie pomiaru poziomu pary wodnej w atmosferze Jowisza. Zakłada się , że poziom tlenu jest skorelowany z początkowym miejscem, z którego pochodzi Jowisz".
"Juno is measuring water vapor in the Jovian atmosphere," said Elisa Quintana, a research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "This allows the mission to measure the abundance of oxygen on Jupiter. Oxygen is thought to be correlated with the initial position from which Jupiter originated."
If Jupiter's formation started with large chunks of ice in its present position, then it would have taken a lot of water ice to carry in the heavier elements which we find in Jupiter. But a Jupiter that formed farther out in the solar system, then migrated inward, could have formed from much colder ice, which would carry in the observed heavier elements with a smaller amount of water. If Jupiter formed more directly from the solar nebula, without ice chunks as a starter, then it should contain less water still. Measuring the water is a key step in understanding how and where Jupiter formed.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6605