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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."
Yet another law to disobey... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2135779.stm
Homer: Facts are meaningless, you can use facts to prove anything that's remotely true!
No, but Moon Handbooks has one out.
Is it in any way possible that Amalthea recieves additional energy from the radiation and gravity in the Jupiter system?
Seriously, as interesting as it would be to find alien life on one of these moons, the more probable scientific interest here would be unlocking a new method of heat creation.
In the future as we attempt to colonize anything other than earth, we might find it's a bit chilly out there. Generating long-term, sustaining heat on a planetary scale without a nearby sun would be a feat indeed! Through closer study we may learn how to artificially introduce these systems to climates that are less hospitable.
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
..I just imagined they find an abandoned settlement/station or reactor or something on/in that moon. I mean really. Just imagine.
:-)
That would render all that debating about economy, sadam, snipers and all that stuff irrelevant, wouldn't it?
Funny to imagine. Things shure would change. For a while that is.
*sigh* Gotta get that code done...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I think at least Io was so volcanic and active because of the extreme "tidal waves" from Jupiter. The "waves" are, due to the huge gravitation of Jupiter, so strong they pull solid matter and this of course cause quite a bit of friction. And friction cause heat. Not really surprising, since such a small object as our Moon does funny things to our seas. :-)
Anyway, to my point, perhaps the same applies to Amalthea?
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Probes are the way to go, its just a pity that for every one sent few manage to survive the trip, the payoff is so great.
Isn't this why there are plans to retrieve some of the upper atmosphere of Venus? There have been several articles on
BTW: I doubt you're going to find water on a planet as hot as Venus
This is why I REALLY hope there is life on Venus
But it would definately be cooler if we found something a bit more advanced than floating bacteria on Almathea, Europa or IO.
If there was life that was slightly more advanced, it is only a matter of time before someone from N*Sync will want to take a field trip out there
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Rescued from disaster- NASA figured out how squeeze data throught the 50 times slower backup attenna when the main one failed- the Galileo mission has extended five years beyond its planned lifetime. Exhaustion of nagivation fuel and other priorities for the Deep Space Network will eventually finish this mission.
It's not the number, it's the size, baby.
(And in seriousness, there's a fair number of theories that think life would not have come about without the large tides raised by the moon.)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Here's a shot of Almathea and of the Galileo probe itself as seen in Celestia.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Interestingly, the same thing is still happening on Earth (well, in Earth I guess). It just isn't very significant next to radioactive decay and other factors (like oxidation and recrystallization) that internally heat the Earth (all of which put together produce about 1/1000 of the heat energy at the surface, pretty much the rest is from solar radiation).