Last July 4th, NASA's Juno spacecraft slowed its record breaking pace just enough to get caught in the pull of Jupiter's gravity. (The timing, according to NASA, was just a very patriotic coincidence.) Either way, Independence Day 2016 was the last time the Juno mission pumped its brakes. In the year since, the 66-foot solar-powered craft has given scientists more and weirder Jupiter data than they ever thought possible.

So, in honor of Juno's first year orbiting the hitherto mysterious gas giant, here's a rundown of the mission's greatest scientific hits so far.

The Design

Without a good spacecraft and mission plan, Juno never would have left orbit. The Lockheed Martin-built spacecraft itself is an engineering marvel: It has traveled further from Earth (1.7 billion miles!) than any solar-powered craft preceding it, and at speeds never before achieved by a manmade object. Juno's engineers also had to protect the craft's delicate instrumentation—which does everything from snap photos to analyze the gas giant's core—from deep space's pipe-burstingly cold temperatures, not to mention Jupiter's powerful radiation and electric field.

None of which would have been helpful if the mission design didn't allow all that fancy machinery to collect good data. Fortunately for Juno, that hasn't been an issue, even though its flight plan is unconventional in the extreme. Not only are Juno's orbits way, way lower than usual—at their lowest points, just 2,500 miles above Jupiter's famous storm clouds—unlike previous Jupiter missions, they're closely spaced to allow the craft to map the entirety of the planet. "Now that we've had such success, we can say the design is one of our greatest achievements," Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator told WIRED in May.

The Poles

The other eccentricity of Juno's orbit is that it isn't equatorial. Instead, it skims over Jupiter's north and south poles, which no one had ever seen before because of Jupiter's very slight axial tilt. (Most planets are tipped over enough for scientists to get a look at their poles from Earth, but Jupiter is practically straight up and down.) Turns out they're stunning—shockingly blue compared to the rest of the planet's stripy orange and white, and covered in cyclones that could swallow Earth whole.