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Probe Shows Jupiter Moon 'Puking' Into Space
Tablizer writes "The New Horizons probe caught the moon Io in the act of 'barfing' into space. A five-frame sequence from the New Horizons probe captured a beautiful plume of ash from Io's Tvashtar volcano. "Snapped by the probe's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as the spacecraft flew past Jupiter earlier this year, this first-ever "movie" of an Io plume clearly shows motion in the cloud of volcanic debris, which extends 330 kilometers (200 miles) above the moon's surface ... The appearance and motion of the plume is remarkably similar to an ornamental fountain on Earth, replicated on a gigantic scale.""
It's probably just dizzy from all that spinning.
So... The demotion of Pluto has finally reached Jupiter?
One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies
So, why does the summary title and text use the terms "puking" and "barfing" when the article itself doesn't make any such references? Gratuitous? "Submitter's license"?
I mean, was that really necessary? Or is the story not interesting enough itself without toilet humor?
When did "puking" and "barfing" become scientific terms? Wouldn't "ejaculate" be a more appropriate term?
So which is it? Puking or barfing? The summary leaves me confused.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I wonder if that's because it got a good look at Uranus?
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
...the slutty drunken sorority moon of Jupiter.
Step 1: Find a science story about a well-observed and described phenomenon. :) :) :)
Step 2: Add a purile, irrelevant adjective, one that will set you apart from the pack.
Step 3: Write it up. Hello, interwebz. Let's move some ads!
Step 4: News aggregate sites filter out the best from all the... oh wait, here comes Zonk. Go, go Slashdot!
Step 5: Profit!
It's full of puke.
I'm amazed by this short sequence.
Considering the distance it's a real neat proof of excellent space ship engineering.
Looking at the hight to which the venting reaches this is one hell of a volcano!
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I don't have anything thoughtful to add about this, so I think I'll just do the cool thing and mock the title of the article. heh. it said puke.
At first I thought the direction of motion of the debri was from right-to-left. However, watching the animation loop for a while, it now appears that it is coming from the middle-to-right center of the plum and spreading out, but below the visible horizon. It is coming up, over the edge as it spreads out.
Table-ized A.I.
put the distance in kilometers?
What you are seeing in this image is mostly sulfur and sulfur dioxide that has condensed out of the gas in the plume. There is also a mix of basaltic ash. The plume consists of gas and dust that escapes from an erupting lava curtain on the surface.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
Bandwidth and in this case, distance from the target. New Horizons required 3 months to return all the data it took during the mission, which included more than just images, but specta and in situ data as well. In addition, the images used to make this movie were taken from a distance of 3.8 million km! The image quality and resolution (~19 km/pixel) is actually much better than we would have gotten at a similar distance from Galileo, Cassini, or Voyager, the previous three missions to observe Io.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
Maybe it's because Jupiter is 365 MILLION miles from Earth.
The limiting factor of the space probes that took the photos would be CURRENT TECHNOLOGY.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
You're so right. Why didn't it say "ejaculating into space?"
Nearly all of the material that is ejected in this plume returns to the surface and forms a giant red ring surrounding Tvashtar. Here is an image that shows the effects of a similar eruption in 2000 and 2001: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02588 As far as what it would look like, we don't have a higher resolution image of the plume, but the plume source was well imaged by Galileo during several encounters in 1999, 2000, and 2001. The source is a curtain of lava, very similar to what you might see at Kilauea in Hawaii. Here is a graphic showing two views taken during those Galileo encounters: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02584 The image on the left shows the fire fountain eruption from 1999 (the actually fire fountain is a drawing of what it would have looked like if the eruption weren't so bright, it saturated the detector, see http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02519 for the original image). During the New Horizons encounter, a similar fire fountain event occurred at the same site (as evidenced by the glow from the lava being visible, during daytime, at visible wavelengths, from a spacecraft 2.5 million km away!) and was the source of the plume linked in the article above. Jupiter's rings are formed through micrometeorite impacts on the surfaces of its inner satellites, particularly Metis and Adrastea. There is a torus of plasma (mostly sulfur and oxygen ions) sharing Io's orbit, but the material for that ring, if you can call it that, comes from Io's atmosphere, not from Io's volcanoes directly. Only 1% of the material ejected by Io's volcanoes reaches escape velocity, while most of the material is ejected at a maximum of 1 km/sec. (compared to Io's escape velocity of 2.6 km/sec.)
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io