New Photos of Io

Anonymous Coward writes "NASA has just released new images of Io taken by Galileo during a flyby several days ago. The images are far better than anything taken of Io before, and an article on the flyby is on ABCnews.com. Apparently NASA wasn't sure if Galileo would survive the radiation it would experience from passing that close to Jupiter, and put off the photo-flyby as long as possible-but it worked, and they're hoping to get one more set of pictures. " The all important question, now, though, is how to make some of these my background image. *grin*

Comments

Re:The REAL energizer bunny

[PD]

If the Mars Observer was one of those old expensive probes, we'd be waiting 10 years for another probe to Mars. It was a huge deal when the Mars probe was lost in 1993(?). That was an expensive one.

Instead, we've lost a probe, and some people wasted some good years of their lives working on the failed mission, but we've got several missions to mars waiting in the wings, or due to arrive at Mars in just a couple months. It's a better way to go.

Even the poor people who spent all their time working on the failed Climate Orbiter mission might be able to salvage their time and research invested by joining other teams, or maybe starting up a brand new project right away. This is much better than letting their awesome talent go to waste.

I also like the idea of spreading the instrument packages around to different spacecraft. If we'd lost Voyager 2, then we'd never have gotten a chance to look at Uranus or Neptune up close. It would have been safer to launch 3 or 4 tiny spacecraft instead, and expected 1 of those to fail. We'd have gotten 3 looks at Uranus and Neptune instead of just 1.

Cool

[rde]

I got these pictures earlier, and must confess that the closest pic was a bit of an anticlimax. This is my own fault, I suppose; I don't know what I was expecting.
Cooler by far is the image with the rather cool title of MO3811ED8E20C261B.tif (the page is slashdotted at the moment, so I can't find a link. Sorry).
9m per pixel? Wow. Congrats to all at NASA.

The color ones are even better

[elfbabe]

http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/io/iocolor.html Some of these are in true color, and some of them aren't, but they're all a little more fun to look at than the black-and-white ones, no matter what the resolution.

more pictures of IO

[J. Tang]

Some other pictures of IO are at http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/ima ges/io/ioimages.html.

Re:The REAL energizer bunny

[pq]

And this is the real pity - with NASA's new "faster better cheaper" program, the missions do exactly what was in the initial mission, no more (though sometimes much less - look at the Climate Orbiter fiasco).

So something like the Sojourner Rover died in a month (its minimal design goal was a week) - if this had been one of the older Cadillac-style overengineered no expense spared missions, it would still be chugging away and getting good science done, instead of having provided us with tantalising glimpses of stuff and then making us sit and twiddle our thumbs for two years.

Of course, "faster better cheaper" means that a single failure is not catastrophic - so the loss of the previous Mars Polar mission was a total disaster (it was one of the big missions) and left us with nothing going towards Mars for years, while the Climate Orbiter failure is unfortunate, but only a six month to one year delay.

Meanwhile, the last of the old dinosaurs speeds on towards Saturn - in spite of the stupid and misguided protests over its RTG power source. People in the planetary science community are praying that Cassini does an Energizer Bunny on them, because the next look at Saturn is at least another decade away...

Background

[MindStalker]

Rob really needs to put a "Background" section in slashdot. As a referense to finding Robs fav background images of all time.