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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."
is that anything like unfrozen ice water?
Lisa, In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Yes i know there are other explainations
Doesn't anyone make a good cooling system for moons?
I thought this Galileo guy died a long time ago. And with him being so busy with Astronomy how did he ever find the time to learn how to Fly?
Boy you sure learn something new everyday reading Slashdot!
And NASA releases a picture of the Intel Inside logo on the surface...
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
a civilization of alien potheads who have hotboxed an entire atmosphere?
or maybe the worlds biggest overclocked processor.
I can't think of any other reasonable theory to account for this moon radiating so much heat.
lysergically yours
I mean, that's the only explanation I can come up with. Ours just...you know, sits there. We go there once, get bored and come back. So we spend our time looking at other planets' moons instead of making it back to ours. I mean really. Give our moon some lubbin'!
Zech Harvey, MCSE, MCDBA, CCNA
For those of us who aren't very much at home in astronomy and it's terms and who just want to see (relatively) pretty pictures; Celestia also has Almathea available for your viewing pleasure, along with allot of different stuff in our solar system and even beyond there. Besides, it's a pretty proggy... :)
Hate me!
...isn't that the planet where they used to build luxury planets for the super-rich?
Spending all these resources investigation such distant objects in outer space when there is so much so close to us that we have yet to get a good view of. Walk before we run people!
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Sorry, I needed that rant.
Cheers!
Did Galileo find a Black Monolith yet?
"All these are yours, save Io. Attempt no landing there."
No problem, guv. These other moons look much more interesting.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Hell, has nobody noticed that the real name is Amalthea?
Where are your classics!?
She was the goat that nurtured baby Zeus = Jupiter!
The Correct spelling is Amalthea.
It says so on the JPL's website.
Also Amalthea was a nymph that nursed Jupiter in mythology. This fits in with the naming of the other moons.
It looks like it was only misspelled once on the astrobio site which may be the cause of the confusion.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
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.
"Almathea is one of the most unusual moons in the solar system, because it gives off more heat than it ceives from the Sun."
Funny. My girl does the same thing during the more active cycles.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
..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
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.
Jupiter is so heavy that it's inner reigions are incredibly hot - some think it's actually a star that just wasn't big enough to have it's own mass crush it's innards to the point where nuclear fusion occurs and the star is born. It's big enough, though, that the innards are squished to to superheat. It's this heat from the inside that makes Jupiter warm up.
The moon's heating is accounted for by tidal forces - Jupiter is just so flippin' MASSIVE that it's gravity stretches and squeezes the moon, and these tidal forces make it heat up.
The surface of Amalthea (sp.?) will be interesting to look at. I think it will have pronounced cracks on the surface where aeons of tidal forces have had their way.
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.
Sorry to pick nits, but the name is Amalthea (ah-mal-THEH-ah), it means "the Goddess Amal" (IIRC a Babylonian name for Astarte, the Moon goddess). She was the goat that nursed Jupiter (Zeus, actually) in Mount Ida, and whose horn the baby god pulled with his mighty force while playing with her. That horn is called the Cornucopia, or the Horn of Plenty, after Jupiter, ashamed at his own clumsiness, bestowed that gift on the goat as an apology.
Dimensions: The length of the spacecraft is 9 m and, with the high-gain antenna (HGA) deployed, is 4.6 m in diameter.
Ha! That's great! Except that the high-gain antenna failed to deploy. Fortunately, with some spacecraft reprogramming, Galileo will still acheive about 70% of its original science goals using the low-gain antenna.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Actually, Triton (Neptune's largest) does, too, IIRC. All the gas giants do as well.
In Amalthea's case (as well as Europa and Io), the moon is constantly being contracted and stretched by Jupiter's gravity, and those tidal forces generate heat in the moon's core. You can duplicate this effect by squeezing a piece of styrofoam in your hand and feeling it heat up.
Of course, all the gas giants have internal heat sources due to the immense gravity in their highly contracted solid cores. Neptune gives off way more heat and light than it receives from the Sun.
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
The "Pluto Express" you mentioned is named New Horizons. And it's yet to be canceled. In fact, I sat in on a technical discussion of all its subsystems over the summer. It's still on track to launch sometime around 2007. However, Congress has yet to approve funding for New Horizons so its up in the air whether or not it'll actually fly. That said, development for the probe is still on going.
Celestia is a 3D space simulator much like OpenUniverse. It's avaible for both Windows and *nix OSes. In it, you can view all the planets, some moons, asteroids, and a fair number of stars. Here's a shot of Almathea. They release add-ons every now and then-- you can even download the recently discovered Quaoar!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking