Juno

All good engineers know that pessimism can help a project, but only in the planning stages. I expect the odds of a successful orbit insertion will be better than a coin flip. These are the critical hours where we will find out if more data will be coming from Juno.

Go Juno.

dont get me wrong I want it to succeed but after watching their news conference I see its no slam dunk. massive radiation, dust and debris in the planets rings. its a harsh environment with a gravitational field that pulls comets apart

Success!

Not that the whole mission's a success - there's a long way to go yet - but at least they neither overshot nor crashed into the surface - stable orbit established.

you're correct, the orbits they desire take months to achieve a single pass so it isn't like our ISS that's flying past almost all the time, Juno swings far out on an elliptical plane before coming back for more radiation another pass through the rings that could really smash it!

an important note, congrats to the Juno team on setting a human speed record, NOTHING we've made has ever gone faster! over 150000MPH

Speed records in space are almost a meaningless piece of data. Back in 1976 the Helios 2 satellite achieved a velocity between it and the sun of 157,058 MPH. Then there's complication of velocity relative to what?

The news media is reporting the record high speed with respect to earth. (The high speed is due to the fact that it is falling deep into Jupiter's gravity well.)

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016/07/08/juno-broke-guinness-world-record-fastest-craft-ever.html

But speed relative to earth doesn't make much sense. The speed of the spacecraft (with respect to earth) will have a large periodic variation due to the earth's orbital speed (66000 mph) in addition to the variation due to Juno's orbit. It only makes sense to look at the heliocentric speed.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-fastest-spacecraft-ever/

If you want to see high speed, wait until 2018 when Solar Probe Plus dives into the sun's gravity well passing about 3.7 million miles from the sun at hit speeds of about 450000 mph.

http://solarprobe.jhuapl.edu/

I wonder how this velocity will compare when one considers the recessional velocity of either Magellanic cloud, Andromeda or even when we are moving away from either Voyagers.

Here is a speed plot for voyager 2:

It got a big boost from Jupiter and Saturn. Uranus and Neptune were a wash, what it got from Uranus it lost from Neptune, but it got some nice travel photos.

Voyager's speed is not much compared to Magellanic clouds or Andromeda.

Redshift for Large Magellanic cloud: 278 km/sec

http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/galaxies/lmc.htm

Redshift for Small Magellanic cloud: 158 km/sec

Redshift for Andromeda: -301 km/sec (actually a blue shift)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy

Wow we're going to be getting some truly awesome pictures....

..."Despite Juno’s sensitive electronics being encased in a one-inch thick solid titanium box to shield it from the intense radiation around Jupiter, eventually it will succumb to the harsh environment. At that time – currently estimated to be in about 20 months – it will be commanded to dive into the atmosphere.

But in that time, it will use it’s nine instruments to learn everything it can about Jupiter’s interior and atmosphere.

It will map Jupiter’s gravity and magnetic fields and track how much water is in the atmosphere. Its colour camera dubbed JunoCam will snap close-ups of Jupiter’s swirling clouds, polar regions and shimmering southern and northern lights."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2016/jul/05/nasas-juno-spacecraft-arrives-at-jupiter-live