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NASA's Juno Space Probe Enters Orbit Around Jupiter (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: NASA says it has received a signal from 540 million miles across the solar system, confirming its Juno spacecraft has successfully started orbiting Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. "Welcome to Jupiter!" flashed on screens at mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. The probe had to conduct a tricky maneuver to slow down enough to allow it to be pulled into orbit: It fired its main engine for 35 minutes, effectively hitting the brakes to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second). Juno was launched nearly five years ago on a mission to study Jupiter's composition and evolution. It's the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter since Galileo. The largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter is a huge ball of gas 11 times wider than Earth and 300 times more massive than our planet. Researchers think it was the first planet to form and that it holds clues to how the solar system evolved. Juno is a spinning, robotic probe as wide as a basketball court. It will circle Jupiter 37 times for 20 months, diving down to about 2,600 miles (4,100 kilometers) above the planet's dense clouds. The seven science instruments on board will study Jupiter's auroras and help scientists better understand the planet's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere. An onboard color camera called JunoCam will take "spectacular close-up, color images" of Jupiter, according to NASA. Juno launched from Cape Canaveral on August 5, 2011, which is some 445 million miles (716 million kilometers) away from Jupiter. Juno has however traveled a total distance of 1,740 million miles (2,800 million kilometers) to reach Jupiter as it had to make a flyby of Earth to help pick up speed. "After a 1.7 billion mile journey, we hit our burn targets within one second, on a target that was just tens of kilometers large," said Nybakken, Juno Project Manger. "That's how well the Juno spacecraft performed tonight."
'In awe, I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebony void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang, for ever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this I thought... I must put a roof on this toilet."
-- Bill Gates
Don't want to add too many basketball court sized objects. And leave Europa alone.
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Making America great again!!!!
... excited about Juno? I mean, it'll be sending some pretty pictures and all... but I just can't get myself that excited about the science mission.
I guess it'll be nice having better information on high energy particles in Jupiter's magnetosphere. I've often been tempted to simulate a concept I had for using Jupiter as a massive particle pre-accelerator for bulk antimatter production, to see what sort of flux in the dozens to hundreds of GeV could be achieved across a reasonable-sized target.
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
Stop pushing your evolutionary agenda and oppressing creationists! Repent and be saved before it's too late!
God created all these sky marbles circling our great ball of fire. The sooner you can accept this, the sooner you can start doing something meaningful and glorious with your life.
What everyone really wants to know is if some feminists are going to demean and belittle a man during his most successful day for wearing a shirt his girlfriend made for him.
Congratulations to the Juno team, you've achieved a phenomenal effort. I hope your day isn't wreaked by some stupid social justice bullshit.
does ellen page go inside the thing? does she come equipped with scissors?
ARE JUPITERS TESTICLES GONNA BE ALRIGHT???????
i need to know
Earth to NASA - plenty of 'gas giants' already here on earth for you to probe (including many slashdot readers)
I'm not trolling, just calling you on your fantastical BS. You and I both know you're making everything up.
It is actually a quote from Les Dawson, an English comedian.
From the article: "Galileo was deliberately crashed into Jupiter on September 21, 2003, to protect one of its discoveries -- a possible ocean beneath Jupiter's moon Europa."
What is that supposed to mean? Protect a possible ocean from what? Or were they protecting Galileo's discovery by destroying evidence? Protecting from whom?
2001: Documentary about space travel reaching Jupiter was released
2016: tourist/exploratory satellite arrives 15 years behind schedule, to take pictures
Memo:
Issue warning to "puny humans" in 30 earth-days. Emphasis on Europa, where we keep all our "stuff" "stuff that explodes", and other unstable stuff
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Again: to anyone who is not trolling: general thoughts?
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
Galileo, like Juno, was not built with sufficient planetary protection processes to ensure that it might not contaminate a place where life might be (e.g. Europa), so rather than leave it in orbit around Jupiter and have Europa run into it on some orbit, they deliberately dispose of it.
Adding the necessary planetary protection is a real cost and schedule burden, so if you can avoid it, you do.
Why can't we get more articles about SystemD and Gnome F-Ups? This is supposed to be news for Nerds. Not sciency junk.
one two
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Don't RTFA. The pictures are unremarkable too, I'm sure we'll get some interesting ones but later.
jews did 9/11?
Again: to anyone who is not trolling: general thoughts?
Only in a very general sense, I'm no expert in the field. (next I'll prove it - heheh) What is the general strength of the earth's magnetosphere in the region where it is working against the solar wind? Possibly a nonsense question - i dunno - but I'm definitely not trolling.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"After a 1.7 billion mile journey, we hit our burn targets within one second, on a target that was just tens of kilometers large," said Nybakken, Juno Project Manger. "That's how well the Juno spacecraft performed tonight."
A planetary scientist mixing miles and kilometers into the same sentence? Really? Okay, now I understand why the Beagle lander crashed.
Perhaps we will finally find out if Arthur C. Clarke was right about the core of Jupiter.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
That depends on what you mean. Are you talking about the magnetic field strength or the flux and energy distribution of ionized particles? The field strength at the surface ranges from 25-65nT, and becomes increasingly more position-dependent with altitude. Jupiter's magnetic field is only something like 15x more intense than Earth's, but it's vastly larger and with a much higher flux. There's some extra amplification effects in the vicinity of Io as well, due to the "io flux tube".
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
In light of Juno entering Jupiter's orbit, I have updated Wikipedia's description of the Eclipse IDE version naming themes.
Space Nutter pablum, all Rei needed to add was something about this rock, gravity wells, the species and Death Asteroids, then the Space Nutter brigade would have upvoted that comment to +5 Insightful.
You can see the trajectory here: http://i.imgur.com/d3TiJAt.gif
Not really; Galileo's main antenna failed to open properly, greatly limiting practical bandwidth. Jupiter has yet to be visited by a photo-intensive mission.
For example, Galileo could not send frequent images of Jupiter's clouds so that weather changes could be monitored in detail for an (Earth) year or more. The other probes sent to Jupiter were merely flyby's (2 Pioneers, 2 Voyagers, 1 New Horizons).
But it appears they decided that studying the core (via gravity patterns) and polar radiation of Jupiter to be more scientifically useful at this time than general imaging. Hence Juno.
Juno's orbit is not well-suited for good imaging of the planet and its moons (except possibly the polar regions of Jupiter).
Maybe in the future, an image-intensive probe will be sent.
Table-ized A.I.
A video replay of the post Juno orbital insertion briefing is available on nasa.gov/nasatv.
Disclaimer: Requires ustream.tv plugin.
We do everything we can to sterilize the probes, but microbes are very good at getting everywhere and hiding out.
Fortunately, that fact hasn't stopped us from sending landers and rovers to Mars.
If Galileo had crashed on Europa, and microbes were later found living on Europa, their DNA would easily tell us whether we're looking at something that originated on Earth.
A bigger problem would be, what if invasive-species-earth-microbes make the native microbes go extinct?
But it seems unlikely that a species that has adapted to Earth's environment, when introduced to Europa, would crowd out species that have adapted to Europa's environment.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Are you on metric time yet? Why not? It would be simpler.
While you were circlejerking about the metric system, America was exploring space.
Have fun assimilating all those subhumans that Fuhrerin Merkel brought in.