This morning I was asked to explore some science articles and videos on the interwebs. Yay, science! I glanced through a few of the suggested resources, then moved on to Googling Juno. I’ve been hearing about Juno all week but really didn’t know much about it and what NASA hopes to learn about Jupiter. It turns out that NASA is investigating Jupiter’s magnetosphere and whether the planet has a solid core. There is more to it… the NASA site is really cool.

So in order to construct Juno, NASA scientists had to study the environment Juno would have to endure, in this case tremendous amounts of radiation. Juno is the product of research and preparation.

It’s a lovely metaphor for inquiry. There were some questions scientists wanted to answer, so they studied as much as they could and prepared their study, June itself, to go to Jupiter. There are certainly environmental factors that the scientists didn’t/couldn’t plan for, but they made the best decisions they could based on the information at hand.

So that’s the result of my inquiry this morning: a nice metaphor.

For the NASA scientists, the results of their inquiry into Jupiter will be an understanding of how Jupiter was formed and more information about the history of our solar system. For me, I’ve reached a neat understanding of inquiry and meta-cognition.

I am not convinced that the outcome for either of us (me or NASA) will be an argument. In many school-oriented inquiry projects, the final destination is argument, a position, a case. Is that how all inquiries turn out?