Americans everywhere celebrated the country™s 240th birthday Monday and those interested in the U.S. space program had another reason to cheer as NASA™s Juno vehicle arrived inside Jupiter™s orbit as midnight approached along the East Coast.

Juno’s real work is about to begin five years from its launch and almost 2 billion miles later as the spacecraft will soon start to send data back to scientists on Earth for an extensive 20-month study of the solar system™s largest planet.

œWith Juno, we will investigate the unknowns of Jupiter™s massive radiation belts to delve deep into not only the planet™s interior, but into how Jupiter was born and how our entire solar system evolved, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said.

Juno also represents a milestone in NASA™s efforts to increase the private sector™s role in America™s space program and the industry name to credit for support in this endeavor is Lockheed Martin.

The company™s Denver-based space systems segment developed and constructed Juno with the help of new techniques to make the vehicle as described in a March 2016 LinkedIn post by Rick Ambrose, head of the $9 billion space business.

œOur Juno spacecraft is¦ flying 3-D printed parts farther than any others produced in the world, 1.7 billion miles to be exact — an achievement that I believe will position us to see large portions of entire satellites being 3-D printed in the not-so-distant future, Ambrose said.

Ambrose gave AL.com a glimpse into how Lockheed could bring a satellite off the assembly line quicker with 3-D printing as part of a wide-ranging interview with the publication in June 2015.

“We’ll never print 100 percent of it. There are elegant components — focal plane arrays or integrated circuits — we can’t print. But can we print enough of it — 70 percent, 60, 80, whatever the number is — that we can take what would normally take five years and reduce it to 24 months.”

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