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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/...
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!
You're complaining that the editors got something 100% right? I mean, they've got some even simpler stuff utterly wrong before. I mean, look at the Self-Driving Tesla Owners Share Videos of Reckless Driving story: somehow, a Volvo engineer became a Volvo driver!
Are you really that stupid? Nobody's talking about Mars! This is to learn about the gas giant for a future colony.
If politicians are composed mainly of hot air, why are they considered humans?
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.
I've always wondered the same thing, so I googled "Can you stand on Jupiter?" Condensed version: at the core is a (??) solid rock and some other stuff, and gasses are so dense and hot, they act more like a liquid. Furthermore, it meets the requirements of a planet; 1. It orbits the Sun 2. It has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape) 3. It has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit (credit: http://www.city-data.com/forum...)
lets all celebrate! Next year on july 4th we will be invaded by them! (by a larger force obviously).
Also, its not a self driving car if its only an assistance system. I mean, the term "self-driving" should only be used for fully autonomous vehicles, otherwise every automobile is "self driving", because it needs no horses.
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!
You're complaining that the editors got something 100% right? I mean, they've got some even simpler stuff utterly wrong before. I mean, look at the Self-Driving Tesla Owners Share Videos of Reckless Driving story: somehow, a Volvo engineer became a Volvo driver!
Well, to be honest, there's a good chance that the Volvo engineer DOES drive a Volvo, so...
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.
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.
Only Earth is a planet! Boot the rest out and build a wall, a yuuuuge beautiful wall. I kind of like Uranus though; its fine, wispy clouds remind me of my great hair.
Table-ized A.I.
I have an urge to go dance on his/her lawn.
Table-ized A.I.
I've always wondered the same thing, so I googled "Can you stand on Jupiter?"
You might also enjoy Jupiter Submarine and Jupiter Descending.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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"
You asked a question and you got an answer.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Though I personally like the "hydrostatic equilibrium" phrase for defining a planet (which would leave the Sun with dozens if not hundreds of planets), it's not part of the definition. In practice, the "clear the neighbourhood" definition almost requires that the object is large enough to have been classically considered a planet. The edge cases are 1 Ceres and 4 Vesta - nearly spherical asteroids (whereas 2 Pallas, smaller than 4 Vesta, is considerably less spherical) but nowhere near having "cleared their neighbourhoods".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
You'd hope that a Volvo engineer would be a Volvo driver.
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.
(it is, in the words of the infamous "Pluto Killer" definition, it has gravitationally cleared it's orbit).
Has it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The point of the "clearing it's neighbourhood" part of the definition is not that every last speck of dust is removed from the orbital vicinity (however you define the region around the line of the orbit - and it's chaotic past and future), but that the planet is capable of scattering or accreting anything in in it's orbit, rather than being scattered by anything in it's orbit. The former is an observation that would require minute inspection of every kilometre of the orbit ; the latter means that you need to study the orbit to find if there is nothing more than about 10% of the mass of the planet/ dwarf planet contender.
If you think that the Jupiter (and Saturnian) Trojans (and the Greeks, at the trailing Lagrange point) invalidate Jupiter (and Saturn) as planets, that's fine. But in that case, 3753 Cruithne invalidates Earth as a planet. Until 3753 Cruithne gets scattered away. When Earth becomes a planet again. Until some other temporary visitor comes into orbital co-residence with the Earth, at which point we are likely to continue calling Earth a planet when in fact it is not, but we don't know that.
Such unstable terminology is undesirable - to most people. Certainly to most astronomers and other scientists. Come to think of it - it would probably offend the sensitivities of most engineers too. Theologians too.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The point being made is that the definition is silly, nothing has cleared its orbit, not even Jupiter the giant of the solar system. So if the definition is something about clearing its orbit of anything that could possibly eject it, that isn't the definition I have ever heard.
https://www.iau.org/public/the...
Even the IAU definition just says cleared its orbit. My guess is that by that definition, and the part about orbiting the sun, there are no planets. It is a silly distinction, and unless the written definition is better than that web site's definition, we are left with no planets in the solar system, they must all be dwarf planets.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That's because you're now near the cutting edge of science. This is a taxonomy for a continuous natural variable. There isn't an obvious criterion for separation (such as the "hydrogen fusion" criterion for distinguishing between a brown dwarf and a star - that's a natural binary criterion), but the IAU people were trying to find a definition which distinguishes between two different, but potentially overlapping, classes.
As a geologist, I don't get terribly fussed up over whether something is a "claystone" (grains averaging less than 1/256 mm in diameter) or a "siltstone" (grains averaging 1/32 to 1/256 mm) because (1) I don't have the apparatus to distinguish the two classes, (2) my clients don't care - they're both too low a permeability to be of interest, and (3) we have the useful term "mudstone" to cover both cases.
The IAU sought to tighten up the definition of "planet". That's a work in progress. One early paper discussing it was presented in 2002, with some additional thoughts by one of the authors here (that one is less than an hour's work to read, unless you want to check every line of the maths; it's what convinced me that my geological favour for the "gravitational self-rounding" criterion was misplaced). A more recent proposal is here. This last one is interesting, as it adds some interesting considerations that I'd not wasted too much of my life thinking about, but I now feel the need to consider.
By the time you've digested a couple of those, you'll be in a better place to discuss the arguments that are occupying almost no astronomer's time outside the bar at conferences. Taxonomy never really gets much attention, once the tool is "good enough" to be useful. Which is where things are, amongst the astronomical community.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
However, in Russell's proposed taxonomy ("proposed" being an important word!), then Earth, being by a factor of hundreds more massive than anything else in the general vicinity, would remain a "principle planet", rather than being demoted to a "belt planet" (Pluto's status in Russell's taxonomy)
Oh, Mr (or Prof) Russell! I know this is a first-draft of a paper. But really! "The planets of the Solar System have incredible diversity." Tut, tut! Their diversity is a matter of observational fact. Whether you or the Flat Earth Society consider this degree of diversity credible or incredible is neither here nor there. As I sometimes drive into a shillelagh's head with 6-in nails, then beat into the skulls of Creationists, "You can choose your opinions, but you can't choose your facts!"
A good point. Got to be careful with terms like that implying un-evidenced expectations.
Yes, the Russell paper was time well spent. Bearing in mind it is a proposal, and it produces codings that look like - well. codings, rather than descriptive terms. In itself, that points at a further question - are you (not we, this is a personal question which you can't answer for the planetary scientist next to you, nor for your mentors or students) involved in this field of study because you're intereted in the formation of planetary bodies in general, or if you're looking to compare the planets of the Sun with average planets in the universe.
While it is generally understood and acknowledged that the biases inherent in current planet-hunting techniques severely bias the plants we identify ; and that these techniques are not well-suited to detecting planetary systems like the one we live in ... well, do we live in a 10% planeary system, a 1% system, or a 0.1% system? That's still not question with a slam-dunk answer.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Thank you for a very informing post. As the OP for this thread, I do think there is more to the discussion that we usually see. I've actually bookmarked your comment here, so I can read those reports you mention, as far as I can. I'm not a scientist, I'm a computer tech, so I'm sure much will be beyond me.
My contention with the demotion of Pluto isn't that a group of scientists have (again) changed a long standing definition, and I simply don't like change. My issue was how the vote was done. A group with an agenda stayed at a IAU convention as everyone else was leaving on the last day. They called a vote when they were the only large block present, and voted their opinion into existence despite what the other IAU members may have wanted. In essence, 424 members disenfranchised 10,000 members.
http://www.space.com/2791-plut...
http://www.space.com/2862-inte...
If the issue had been hashed out with the full membership, and then a vote was cast, I could accept it. Even if it only passed by 1 vote, I could accept it. But to have such a small group with an agenda make such an important decision is ridiculous. Quite honestly, the issue should not have been brought to a vote at all with such a small number present. Imagine if the US Congress was able to pass laws that way; whoever held the seat of power would call midnight votes when only their five closest allies were awake. Even if it was a law I agreed with, I wouldn't want it passed that way.
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.
(2) Most astronomers don't care. If your specialism is mass flow from Wolf-Rayet stars, is it good use of your budget to pay for another night in the hotel ? This isn't business with infinite money to piss against the wall -that hotel room may cost a half-week of employment for a post-doctoral assistant. (3) 434 voted. That would easily encompass the world's complement of planetary scientists who cared about the question.
I made an error in my earlier post when I suggested that hydrogen burning 'defined' star vs. a not-star. Re-reading the relevant literature on the train yesterday, I realised that, for some people, the important question is formation by core-accretion vs. gas collapse. Again I suspect that the definition of a "star" (not re-definition, but the first definition) is an issue looming in the near future. Consider, for example, some of the current undoubted Brown Dwarf stars with surface temperatures comparable to Venus' surface. Do they shine? To the human eye? To a far IR telescope like JWST? Perhaps that's a good debate to have before the scope gets launched.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"