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Jupiter's "Mini-Me" Solar System Grows
An anonymous reader writes "University of Hawaii's robotic telescopes have discovered 8 new moons for Jupiter, thus bringing its mini solar system to 48 total. No one knows how Jupiter dissipates the energy of these likely asteroid captures, unless it once had a massively larger atmosphere. Indeed, its ion cloud today seems to spell doom for what Sir Arthur C. Clarke indicated, is another reason to avoid probing life on Europa. ('All these worlds are yours--except Europa. Attempt no landings there.'-- 2010: Odyssey Two). As an aside, one of those NASA sites seem technically to be doing text-to-speech in a very familiar-sounding, Stephen Hawkings version [MP3] of those articles."
Recent results from Galileo indicate that Callisto and Ganymede may also have vast oceans beneath their surfaces. So ruling out Europa doesn't mean that there is no life in the Jovian system.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
At the moment it is just the resolution of our imaging techniques that limits what we call a satellite. There are bound to be hundreds, if not thousands of smaller bodies around Jupiter that we haven't spotted yet.
Let's just hope that they fit future spacecraft with radar, or send a man up the main mast.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Although a halfway step would be nice - a high resolution Europa orbiter would be very useful. Then we could see exactly what the whole surface looked like, map it with radar and so on. Perhaps we could map the heat flow through the surface from that projected Europan ocean, work out what trace materials form those dark streaks, perhaps it would even be able to remote sense organic compounds that have come to the surface.
Still we can at least rule out a manned mission - the Jovian magnetosphere would cook any Frank Pooles and Dave Bowmans long before they got to Europa.
Best wishes,
Mike.
ceejayoz writes "A newly discovered gas cloud around Jupiter, created by ion radiation hitting the surface of Europa, has cast doubt on possible life on the moon.
The ion cloud is completely irrelevant to the chances of finding life deep in the oceans of Europa. The Earth itself is surrounded by belts of ionized radiation. Ions bombard the atmosphere hard enough for it to visibly glow near the magnetic poles. And yet life thrives in just about every Earth environment that isn't molten rock. And the original posted link about the Jovian ion torus never mentioned any hazards to Europan life.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Actually it was State-of-the-art Text-to-speech at the time... Centigram Communications now SS8 Networks (91 E. Tasman San Jose surrounded by Cisco buildings ) started licensing the technology in 1993. It is based on a mathematical simulation of the vocal cords and voice tract and was very good in the day.
:-)
Beside the actually voice quality the system also had very context sensitive parsing and could read addresses, titles, newspaper headaline, etc. properly.
One of the major licensees was Lernout & Hauspie who sometime around 1997 bought the division from Centigram.
Everyone knows it as the voice of Stephen Hawking. We also gave a courtesy system to Governor Pete Wilson back in 94/95 when he lost his voice while campaigning.
Centigram is now long gone. It was bought by ADC Telecommunications at the height of the telco frenzy back in the summer of 2000 for $200M cash. ADC sold it to SS8 Networks a year later for ten cents on the dollar.
Easy come, easy go. Technology marches on, soon to make all current forms of government obsolete... or die trying.
Andrew
Twelve $600 2Ghz Celeron systems circa 2003 have the same (or greater) rendering power as the $5M+ 300 100Mhz SuperSparc (SparcStation 20s) cluster used by Pixar to render Toy STory in 1995. I'm having fun with Povray...