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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.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
No because this is a professional team that is wearing Polo shirts with the mission patch instead of being attention seekers. They realize they represent thousands of people that dedicated a decade of their lives to make this work.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/04/...
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
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.
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.
Don't RTFA. The pictures are unremarkable too, I'm sure we'll get some interesting ones but later.
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.
Boo fucking hoo. You're going on TV, dress like you're a professional.
What does a professional scientist dress like? The fashionistas in HR? The suits? The guys in the shop? The maintenance people? Correct answer is all of those.
I always had multiple sets of clothing at work, to suit whoever I was dealing with, from jeans and T-shirts, to 1960's-esque white shirt, black suit, and skinny black ties. But I was occasionally called into a meeting with the jeans and t-shirt. A quick apology and it was on to the meeting. I'll note that some thought that my dressing for the occasion wasn't appropriate - its a crazy world.
His shirt was entirely appropriate for a post-work get together with friends. I was immediately put in mind of "The Illustrated Man" novel. Other than that, no nudity, no offensive actions portrayed, so anyone offended by his shirt is simply starting out offended.
They had just accomplished something amazing - and some assholes only noticed a shirt. Now that is something I find offensive. He deserves the apology, not the thin skinned outrage monkeys.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
"The problem with quotes on the internet is that they are often untrue or misattributed." -Abraham Lincoln
To quote an ex-boss of mine "I can't take a techie serious that comes in a three piece suit. If he knew his stuff, he wouldn't feel the need to hide behind clothing".
In general, he was right.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Boring Shirts. Why are they not in suits? Polo shirts are not professional in the least.
Let me guess, you're one of those management types who's all about schmoosing and looking the part without actually playing any part.
The only people I ever see wear suits now a days are those trying to sell us something.
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.