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

Re:Gives out more heat that it recieves.

[Jugalator]

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?

Leaves me feeling depressed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I read stories on Galileo I get an incredable feeling of depression, not because the mission has been a failure, it has not. Rather that the craft never reached its full potentual. Early in the mission, the main arial to earth never opened meaning that the amount of pictures we get now are much lower then what we should have gotten, Sometimes I think that Galileo could have been the mission which found life on another planet besides earth. This would have changed everything, instead of planning wars today we would be planing probes to discover what the hell was out there.(a real long shot). Things like the pluto express would not have been cancelled, and millions would not be wasted on the ISS - a project which gets all its money just from the cool factor, and like the shuttle a complete waste of resources.

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.

Re:Earth has Moon Envy

[edremy]

Nah. Ours is the biggest, at least in relation to our size. (Forget Pluto+Charon; they're just comets that took a wrong turn.)

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.)