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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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You should go back to getting excited about Apps and TV shows instead.
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.
Ok, I'll kick it up a notch.
After hearing about Rei's idea, I've often been tempted to simulate a concept I've had for using THE SUN as a massive particle pre-accelerator for bulk antimatter production, to see what sort of flux in the hundreds to BILLIONS of GeV could be achieved across a reasonable-sized target.
After that I'll try it on the super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
I'd leave that one out of the stand up material mate.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It is actually a quote from Les Dawson, an English comedian.
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.
Clearing up a pile of guesswork with hard data is always helpful.
At very least, a mission like this make our capacity of guessing stuff on distant planets better.
The solar wind is nowhere near as concentrated as the flux around Jupiter.
And there is nothing preposterous about the concept of mini-magnetosphere generation, it's a very mainstream research topic in spacecraft shielding.
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
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.
Contamination.
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.
You're just making that up for karma whoring. And it's a really pathetic attempt at karma whoring, honestly. Try harder next time.
Well then, falsify it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I remember when /. wasn't full of bloody morons.
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.
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.
If everyone could speak the same language (metric), everything would be simpler.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Europa is a very good candidate for extraterrestrial life. It's got oceans of liquid water kept warm by the gravitational tug of Jupiter. If we send future space probes to Europa and find microbial life, it will quite possibly be the biggest discovery of the modern era. However, if Galileo crashed on Jupiter, there would have been a slight chance that microbes on the space probe could have contaminated the moon. We do everything we can to sterilize the probes, but microbes are very good at getting everywhere and hiding out. Some can even survive space's vacuum and intense radiation. If we do find life on Europa, we want to be 100% certain that it is Europa-originated life and not Earth life brought there by something we sent to the moon earlier.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
Please stop trolling. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this mission, especially for a meteorologist. It's actually very interesting to study the atmospheres of other planets, and has relevance to resources and potential habitability of other planets.
I once wrote a paper for a climate modeling class about how to simulate the climate on a terraformed Mars. It's a very interesting planet, and one that poses some unique challenges versus Earth. We only have one substance of any significance to climate that changes state at normal Earth temperatures, which is water. That's different on Mars, where you get carbon dioxide clouds. That has to be accounted for in weather and climate modeling.
Jupiter has many cloud bands across each hemisphere. If Earth were shrouded in clouds, we would have three bands in each hemisphere. Our rotation and resulting Coriolis effect is such that we have three cells in each hemisphere, the Hadley, Ferrel, and polar cells. Venus rotates a lot slower, so you'd only get one per hemisphere. Jupiter rotates a lot faster, so you have numerous cloud bands and regions of westerlies and easterlies. There's also a lot of reason to be curious about the Great Red Spot and somewhat similar features on other gas giants. If you looked at the very top layer of Earth's atmosphere from space, to the relative depths that we've examined Jupiter, you'd miss most of the really interesting stuff. Our weather happens in the troposphere, but you'd never know anything about it. You'd also know nothing about the heterogeneity from one place to another. Galileo provided one vertical profile into the troposphere of Jupiter before it stopped transmitting. This mission will provide a lot more information about the structure and dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere.
I'm sorry you don't find this interesting or useful, but it really is.
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.
So, go for it. I've no clue what the implications of that are but it sounds damn impressive.
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In light of Juno entering Jupiter's orbit, I have updated Wikipedia's description of the Eclipse IDE version naming themes.
Not "understand". "Excited about". I'm more than aware of what the science objectives are and what hardware is on the craft. I just don't find them particularly interesting. Just because you personally find knowing studying Jupiter's upper atmospheric composition and dynamics exciting doesn't mean that I somehow must. I would far rather get a better understanding of Venus's atmosphere than Jupiter's, for example.
Is this how you generally behave, that anyone who doesn't share your interests must somehow be an idiot who just doesn't understand what your interests really are? Yeah, I much prefer solid bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium to gas giants - so freaking sue me.
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
Too many projects, too little time :( But I'll get to it eventually. I've worked with GEANT4 before on some spallation work, I just need to pick it up again.
(Then again, come to think of it, I'm not sure how well it'd deal with bulk plasma interactions... I may need to look into other tools. Or... hmm..)
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
Thought police much? Since when is not being excited about something "trolling"? Am I not allowed to not be excited about something that you happen to be excited about?
And of all of the planets one could study the atmosphere of, I couldn't think of one less interesting than Jupiter's overwhelmingly hydrogen-dominated atmosphere, so heavily focused on light-gas reactions. We have massive gaps in our knowledge of two of the three "interesting", very complex atmospheres in our solar system (Titan and Venus... the third, well understood one being Earth). Even Pluto's nitrogen/methane photochemistry is IMHO more interesting than Jupiter's atmospheric chemistry. The last two atmospheres I'd want to spend money on a probe to go study would be Jupiter's and Saturn's - the ice giants are at least somewhat more interesting.
Meh. On Venus there's likely dozens, and we don't even know them all. Mars' atmospheric chemistry is trivial compared to Venus's and Titan's. And there's really big mysteries on both. Titan, examples: where's the acetylene and ethylene going? Is there really a downward flux of hydrogen, and if so, where is it going? Where's the methane coming from? Venus, examples: where's all of the mercury that should have baked out of its rocks and be setting in its atmosphere? What's the mystery UV absorber in the clouds? Are the surface fogs real, and what are they? What's the lower cloud made of - phosphoric acid? What are the "metal snows", and are there more than one type? And on and on, for both of them.
Venus rotates a lot slower, so you'd only get one per hemisphere.
Except that Venus doesn't behave like that. Venus is a superrotator (for crying out loud, you wrote a climate paper modeling a planet and you don't even know that Venus's atmosphere superrotates?). It has a hadley cell which stretches around the whole planet up to about 60 degrees, followed by cold collars, followed by very unusual polar vortices (sometimes described as double vortices, but the shapes are irregular and vary with time). That's just at the cloud level - our understanding of the deep atmosphere is highly limited. Venus also has somewhat Earthlike jet streams, gravity waves visible at the cloud deck (despite the great distances to the surface), and interesting, Earth-reminiscent tropospheric convection in the middle cloud layer (with possible rains and snows), plus lightning, although its location and details are unknown (and the data on it is often just weird... including the possibility of a layer in the lower atmosphere that "zaps" conductive objects as they move through it)
We have a sister planet sitting right next to us with crazy-complex atmospheric chemistry who we know pathetically little about and which is easy to get to with frequent launch windows and short transit times. Instead, we're studying the simple light gases of a much further body that likes to fry spacecraft orbiting it. No, Juno doesn't really capture my interest. But apparently that makes me a "troll".
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
In response to a person whose post was "Just because YOU don't understand the science mission ... Again, just because YOU don't understand why this science is important, then well, maybe you should just STFU...."?
I'll go with the former.
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
Well, excited... not every space mission is exciting. Yes, space is vast and awesome and whatnot, and that Pluto probe earlier this year sure was flashier because, hey, first time near that ex-planet, that's new and exciting. And this one, boo, old planet, boooooring!
Well, a few interesting tidbits will come out of this. First and foremost, we'll get the best pictures ever from Jupiter. Resolution will be close to 15km per pixel, almost 10 times what Hubble Space Telescope could achieve, and WAY better than the stuff we got back from the probes in the 70s. We might actually get to see details of the stormy clouds. We'll also get a lot more information about them altogether, since the storms on Jupiter are one of the key elements of the research. The big red spot is shrinking, and maybe we'll get to know why (and what the hell it is in the first place). We're after all talking about a phenomenon that exists for as long as we can observe it, and that it shrinks right now in our lifetime, and with a speed we can actually observe, that makes it at the very least noteworthy.
We'll also get to learn a lot about the magnetic field of Jupiter, a magnetic field SO vastly stronger than the one here on our planet that it's not even on the scale anymore. That thing is huge and insanely powerful, and we could learn a fair lot about how such incredible magnetic fields work. Magnetic fields, as we know, can trap very interesting particles that would otherwise not be observable, and maybe we can observe something like that. I'm not saying that we'll find antimatter or some new exotic matter (mostly 'cause Juno doesn't have anything to detect it), but the mere presence of such an insanely strong magnetic field and a probe that can actually analyze it better than we could ever before does make me quite expectant that we'll find out SOMETHING new here. This is something we could not observe anywhere else, we cannot observe this here on Earth and we can't observe it from here on Jupiter, so this is certainly one area where I'd expect quite a few interesting results, if not even surprises.
Same goes for the plasma and radio equipment the probe carries. Lots of uncharted lands here, lots of things we could find out. It might be full of surprises.
So to be honest, yes, I'm quite happy the maneuver succeeded and I'm quite a bit more hopeful to find something exciting than I was with New Horizons. Because Jupiter has a huge impact on our planet. It acts like a huge asteroid vacuum and I think it would certainly help to know more about this huge gas ball.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Considering what kind of money we usually waste on airheads with a god complex, that one was a steal.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wow, you're old.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You can see the trajectory here: http://i.imgur.com/d3TiJAt.gif
I have to agree. I love when there is a new probe sent out which arrives safely, and I know what a challenge it is to get something into Jupiter orbit without it frying the electronics of whatever is on it, but studying Jupiter's gas atmosphere? Okay, I guess some probe has to do it at some point.
It would be interesting to have some direct evidence of the liquid metallic hydrogen that is supposed to be under the cloud layers, but I agree that Venus would probably be a lot more interesting to us as Earth dwellers.
The Venera probe images have always been pretty interesting to me. Venus is basically Hell on Earth and you can see that in those images. That's got some real interest for me because it is at the same scale we think of with Earth, only gone horribly wrong.
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.
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.