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NASA's Juno Spacecraft Braves Jupiter Radiation For a 4th of July Arrival (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: July 4, if all goes well, will be an occasion for celebration at NASA as the Juno spacecraft, after a nearly five-year voyage, will go into orbit around Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Juno will spend its time in a zone of intense radiation, against which it has been armored, in an effort to ferret out Jupiter's secrets. By so doing, NASA hopes to gain insights into the origin of the solar system as well as gaining more knowledge of the gas giant, comprised mostly of hydrogen and helium with trace elements of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of glowing auroras over Jupiter just days before NASA's new Juno spaceship arrives to orbit the gas giant. "These auroras are very dramatic and among the most active I have ever seen," said Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester, UK, and principal investigator of the study.
"It almost seems as if Jupiter is throwing a fireworks party for the imminent arrival of Juno,..
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/01/...
If it is composed mainly of Hydrogen and Helium, why is it considered a planet?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Jupiter is the largest planet? Gosh, had that not been in the sentence none of us would ever have figured that out. This is news for nerds, not news for planettists. Thank you, intrepid editors, for understanding and saving me from confusion!
Are you really that stupid? Nobody's talking about Mars! This is to learn about the gas giant for a future colony.
Just give up, you fail.
NASA has a budget that is 0.5% of the federal budget. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you want wasteful spending, I'm sure there are other bigger-ticket items than NASA.
Wow, talk about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel!
It tickles me whenever somebody on the left is worried about wasting taxpayers' money.
I'm guessing you must be that stupid. The parent to your post was saying ALL space missions are useless (to him).
And no, there will be no future colony on any gas giant. That is not why Juno is studying Jupiter.
lets all celebrate! Next year on july 4th we will be invaded by them! (by a larger force obviously).
NO SHIT, space Sherlock. Jeeeeesus.
The Federal Government itself says it wastes over 7 TIMES as much as the entire NASA budget, every year. Medicare, Medicaid, and EITC fraud alone is $95 billion a year.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
that means jupiter could be the solar system's gas station someday
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
for the images sent back by JunoCam. It's actually not one of the scientific instruments; NASA says it is rather there for outreach to the public at large. But still - imagine what eye-wateringly beautiful images of Jupiter's cloud tops we may get. Moreover, think of a "pale blue dot" shot through Jovian wisps. I remember being a teenage boy, much engrossed with astronomy (I had my own telescope, bought on "credit on my pocket money"), when the first Voyager images came in. They were printed in a paper magazine - there was no internet back in those times. The images nailed me down on my seat for many, many hours. And now... Juno. Wow. Glad to be alive in these times!
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Without space exploration, you wouldn't have the very computer you typed your message on.
So yeah, your apology is accepted.
Space woosh!!!
It affects a lot of people, perhaps millions. With the Juno spacecraft so far out there it is really clear why Juno's internet speeds are so sucky and we know that they will only get worse.
What happens if the nozzles fail to work and it keeps going? Will it get a second chance, like Japan's Venus probe?
Table-ized A.I.
He probably would.
I don't think you can hear a whoosh in space. Cut the man some slack.
Nobody will ever colonize Mars. It's a barren wasteland. The cloud tops of Venus are...
...a barren wasteair? :D
Ezekiel 23:20
Space exploration has a dangerous risk of contaminating other worlds and destroying their indigenous life. Such things may well have happened already on Mars, where Earth-based microbes hitched a ride on the many landers and rovers.
Possible but unlikely. The same way 99.999% of bacteria and viruses are not harmful to humans, unless they're specialized for the extreme environments, they'll just die. The typical worst case is contamination that creates a false positive in detection of life
I mean weren't we very clearly told not to go there?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Yes we would. NASA has almost no impact on semiconductor development. Certainly far less than DoD.
And even if Mars is contaminated... who cares? If there's any life at all on Mars it's microscopic. If the choice is between exploring Mars with the eye to eventual colonization and leaving it untouched in case some Martian bug is affected, I'm all for exploration.
"No impact"...such as boostrapping the fledgling digital IC industry by buying 100k+ units and teaching the manufacturers to do proper QA?
Ezekiel 23:20
To the real deal. Not some shiity site that makes you answer surveys to read content. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p...
Silence is a state of mime.
It's a drop in the bucket compared to DoD. The original semiconductors were built for ICBMS, not NASA vehicles. And the military knows quite a bit about QA.
This is what I hate about Apollo project boosterism. They've taken credit for things they had nothing to do with at all, like velcro, and also for things that would have happened anyway or for which they only had a small part, like semiconductors.
If it was that simple then what we would see today is the military sitting on shiny new 1970s electronic tech while the rest of us would be stuck with 1960s designs. NASA, resource exploration and a pile of other things provided a market for new semiconductors instead of the DoD ordering the same secret chips every year for 40 years.
If you can hear a woosh it is air leaking from your spacesuit
You think NASA, with 0.5% of the budget orders more semiconductors than the military (30%+ during the cold war)? Really? Doesn't that seem ridiculous on its face?
Jupiter isn't worth exploring.
Jupiter has a lot of helium-3 that could be mined by an airplane and sent back to Earth to power fusion reactors.
NASA...budget ... is 0.5% of the federal ...
A while ago, there were some guys who didn't care about space. They didn't have a space program at all, and they were occupied with day to day concerns like food and finding a girl. Well, one day, without any forewarning, because they didn't have a space program, a rock came out of the sky and killed all of them. This was 65 million years ago.
(||) Nehmo (||)
There's more contributions that are somewhat less visible. For example, the guidance software was perhaps the first application of a real-time/online priority-driven scheduler. You have this thing in your operating system's kernel right now. It was developed for Apollo's embedded computer. These concepts developed for Apollo were fairly quickly adopted by IBM and found their way into their mainframes and then into virtually every computer save for the tiniest ones. Likewise, the guy who came up with this wrote the first working algebraic compiler around 1953 or so.
Ezekiel 23:20
It's not semiconductors in total, but at the highest point, the Apollo project was responsible for 60% of global IC demand.
Ezekiel 23:20
Honestly, working commercial fusion seems much more of a pipe dream than a working and economical space infrastructure. It's in no way clear that the material problems aren't insurmountable. In fact, even the proposal to import thorium from the Moon would probably be more viable, assuming that we didn't have enough thorium here on Earth in the first place (which we actually have).
Ezekiel 23:20
Helium-3 fusion is aneutronic. You could make a reactor small enough to power a car. A thorium reactor can be made that size too, but the neutrons would leak out of the engine and kill the driver.
Building airships is a known technology. Biotechnology could, relatively easily, mine the CO2 atmosphere of Venus for carbon compounds for structural materials (carbon fibre plus the necessary epoxy (or other) resins to bind the carbon fibre - most commentators forget that utterly essential component). How to support the biotech - using gas bags and pans, or making composites like Portuguese Men o' War which can support themselves in the atmosphere - is an open question. If you want land, then you'll need to dump most of the atmosphere onto the ground - another task for biotech that excretes thermally stable carbon compounds which will precipitate out to ground level. you may need to add water - gigatonnes - which would be better added at the start of the project rather than the end, because the delivery process would be quite disturbing to floating infrastructure.
No need for Unobtanium.
By contrast, all terraforming proposals I've seen for Mars ignore the need to add water, and then continually add more water to keep the atmosphere habitable.
Long term habitation (gigayear plus) of Venus would require some attention to the brightening sun, but that's easily doable if you're already committed to the massive engineering of terraforming.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
What's that Lassie? They don't exist except as vapourware? Gosh, I'm so surprised that I'm going to fall backwards into this Old Mine Shaffffffftttttttttt ...
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I only wrote two sentences yet you posted without reading the second one. Good job Rusty!
Texas Instruments were huge without a lot of military work as an example.
The microprocessor and more powerful computers were designed specifically for space exploration.