Pluto Probe Makes Discoveries at Jupiter

Riding with Robots writes "No, it's not an accident due to a metric-to-English-units error. In February, the New Horizons probe passed through the Jupiter system on its way to Pluto, and we saw some spectacular pictures. Now, the science teams have published detailed scientific results, along with new images and movies. The probe's instruments saw clouds form from ammonia welling up from Jupiter's lower atmosphere, and heat-induced lighting strikes in the polar regions, and fresh eruptions on the volcanic moon Io. New Horizons also captured the clearest images ever of the tenuous Jovian ring system, where scientists spotted clumps of debris that may indicate a recent impact inside the rings, or some more exotic phenomenon." I bet Neil DeGrasse Tyson will be on 7 Discovery channel specials talking about these new discoveries inside of the week. Hope he's nicer than he was to poor Pluto :)

money well spent

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever a camera is hurled near solar system big planets, it catches something interesting. We should establish permanent automatic research stations in orbit(s) of at least Jupiter, if not all of them. It is scientific treasure-trove.

All irreverance aside, fantastic stuff!

[decipher_saint]

I mean, each paper sounds completely intriguing:

Polar Lightning and Decadal-Scale Cloud Variability on Jupiter
Kevin H. Baines, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Io Volcanism Seen by New Horizons: A Major Eruption of the Tvashtar Volcano
John R. Spencer, Southwest Research Institute

Clump Detections and Limits on Moons in Jupiter's Ring System
Mark R. Showalter, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute

Jupiter Cloud Composition, Stratification, Convection & Wave Motion: A View from New Horizons
Dennis C. Reuter, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Io's Atmospheric Response to Eclipse: UV Aurorae Observations
Kurt D. Retherford, Southwest Research Institute

Energetic Particles in the Jovian Magnetotail
Ralph L. McNutt Jr., Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Diverse Plasma Populations and Structures in Jupiter's Magnetotail
David J. McComas, Southwest Research Institute

New Horizons Mapping of Europa and Ganymede
William M. Grundy, Lowell Observatory

Jupiter's Nightside Airglow and Aurora
G. Randall Gladstone, Southwest Research Institute

These are all highly fascinating subjects each worth a read let alone the fantastic gallery: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos.html [jhuapl.edu]

I completely support the New Horizons team, they're doing amazing things from behind a computer screen. Something I honestly wish I could do.

Re:unlikely

[camperdave]

So, if a permanent automatic system was installed there, it would give us exactly the same day by day, year from year.

Maybe it would, and maybe it wouldn't. We don't know. Does the vulcanism on Io go through seasonal variations? Does it only happen on Io, or are there other geologically active moons in orbit? The Cassini probe showed that we can park a satellite in orbit around these far planets, and obviously a permanently stationed device is going to give far more detailed data than one that's whizzing past. I think it's wasteful to launch these probes and have them leave the solar system when they could be inserted into orbit around a planet and give us years worth of useful data. As far as I know, apart from Earth, the only planets we have probes around are Mars and Saturn... and maybe Venus.

Re:All irreverance aside, fantastic stuff!

[Hatta]

So here's what I don't understand. They captured some beautiful images the fluid dynamics of gasses mixing in jupiter's atmosphere. How is it that these gasses can keep mixing and not reach equilibrium? I see the same schlieren patterns if I add some glycerol to some H2O and invert the tube a couple times. But invert it a little more and they're gone. What is jupiter doing to keep its atmosphere from doing the same? Are some of the gasses in its atmosphere immiscible or something?

Re:money well spent

[rbanffy]

Galileo was pretty much a "permanent" monitoring station, at least as far as space probes go. It was around Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 and gathered a whole lot of information. So is Cassini around Saturn and Mars has a good couple of them orbiting it.

That said, I agree it would be clever to design and assemble generic space probes with a generic instrument package and launch them towards some promising targets. If we can assemble a dozen of simple probes (or modular ones - i.e. inner solar system solar power module x deep space RTG power, custom instrument packages) instead of one twelve times more complex and launch them towards interesting targets it would give us a lot of coverage on a lot of other nearby objects for the same price (and in far less time). If something turns out to be more than an uninteresting lump of rock or ice, we could always send another probe with a custom instrument package. And, if the original one still has propellant on board, it could always be re-missioned to something else.

Maybe we could focus not on "Back to the Moon", "See Pluto" and "Probe Mars" specific projects and create a continuous exploration infrastructure that could serve us well for decades. If we focus too much on learning how to build a better spacecraft while building the spacecraft, the exploration becomes the least interesting thing in the project. If we focus more on the destination than on the vehicle, chances are we will get spacecrafts out to the launch pad on less time, within budget and more frequently than today. And by building more of them, launching more of them and testing more of them, we will end up learning just as much about how to build a better spacecraft.

This one-off custom-designed space probe business can become costly real quick.