Galileo's Flyby of Almathea

An anonymous reader writes "The spectacular Galileo flybys of Jupiter, Europa and Io are largely credited with the discovery of frozen water ice and some of the earliest examples of non-solar (tidal) heating anywhere in our solar system. For the next 10 days, Galileo scientists are preparing for their next target: probing one of Jupiter's moons, Almathea, at the close-up range of 100 miles. Almathea is one of the most unusual moons in the solar system, because it gives off more heat than it receives from the Sun."

Comments

For those looking for Earth like planets...

[MrFenty]

This sort of place is exactly the sort of reason I think, if we find life elsewhere in the universe (intelligent or otherwise) then it won't have to be on a planet that looks exactly like Earth and at roughly 1 AU from its local star. Here we have a moon that gives off heat, at a very large distance from its sun. There is no reason for us to be arrogant enough to assume that life can only exist on a place that looks identical to our place. This really bugs me, when I see people say "life can't exist there, that planet is twice Earth's distance from its star..." and rubbish like that. Aarrgghh !

Sorry, I needed that rant.

Looking at Jupiter and its moons

[igotmybfg]

Two summers ago, one of my friends in University here asked me to come outside with her and look at something which she described as 'cool'. Thinking I might get some :) I went with her, and we set up a tripod and telescope and ended up watching the stars all night long. For a time we focused on Jupiter, and though I couldn't see Almathea, I did see Jupiter, Callisto, Io, Europa, and Ganymede. The thought that there was nothing (well, almost nothing) in between me and those huge, huge objects that were so very far away still sends tingling down my spine whenever I think about it. It reminds me, when I think that there is pretty much nothing left to do or discover, that there is indeed a whole universe out there, waiting for (or perhaps indifferent to) us.

Cheers!

Re:Shift the focus already

[ChuckDivine]

While I strongly support looking for close in objects, it's not like it's an either/or situation. The world has lots of astronomers (and other kinds of scientists as well). We also have resources sufficient to do research into a wide variety of astronomical phenomena.

Those of us who have actually done some political work in support of looking for earth approaching asteroids only ask for a few millions of dollars to finance such work. Focusing all of our attention on nearby objects would be foolish and wasteful in the extreme.

Re:Leaves me feeling depressed...

[raduga]

With the primary arial undeployed the primary effect has been a reduction in the total number of pictures, and the frequency at which they are captured and returned; since the low-gain antenna / tape recorder are still capable of bringing back images of the same quality, just not nearly as many.

It's disappointing, sure, but even had the arial been fully deployed, we wouldn't have significantly greater resolution, and might not see substantially more detail of Europa's surface. Also, the change in mission priorities might (?) have meant fewer resources spent on magnetometric observations. Events don't seem to change frequently enough on Europa's surface that a few missing frames would have changed our view much.

(Contrast with Io! What if we'd missed that eruption?)