NASA Releases Juno's First Stunning Close-Ups of Jupiter's Giant Storm (theverge.com) 55
NASA's Juno spacecraft has sent back the first photos from its close flyby over Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot. These images offer the closest ever view of the massive storm. The Verge reports: Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for a little over a year on a mission to study the planet's interior, atmosphere, and magnetosphere. Its elliptical orbit around the planet takes the probe close to the surface for a few hours every 53 days. These are called perijove passes -- and on July 10th, Juno completed its seventh. A little after its closest approach, Juno's camera, JunoCam, snapped a few shots of the storm from about 5,000 miles above. Typically, a team of NASA scientists chooses which images a spacecraft collects on its path around a planet. But with Juno, NASA's opened up the process to the public: space fans can weigh in on the photos JunoCam shoots by ranking their favorite points of interest. After the photos are taken, NASA releases the raw images for the public to process. People can crop them, assemble them into collages, and change or enhance the colors. The results are mesmerizing. You can view even more photos here.
Radiation (Score:4, Informative)
I find it amazing that the probe is able to take the beating of passes that close to the planet, given the significant amount of radiation exposure that entails. Awesome pics!
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Re:Radiation (Score:5, Informative)
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Power from Radiation (Score:4, Informative)
I would have designed the probe to utilize the radiation as a power source, prolonging the mission. I don't understand why the mission planners didn't utilize this obvious power source but I'm sure they had their reasons. I would have done things completely differently.
How would you possibly do that?.
It turns out that, while the radiation is damaging (because each particle has high energy per particle), the actual amount of power represented by the radiation flux is not very high. You can tell that from the fact that Juno doesn't heat up when it crosses the radiation belts.
For what it's worth, here's a paper discussing radiation effects on power systems at Jupiter: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/... [nasa.gov]
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I would have designed the probe to utilize the radiation as a power source, prolonging the mission. I don't understand why the mission planners didn't utilize this obvious power source but I'm sure they had their reasons. I would have done things completely differently.
And you would have implemented that how? C'mon Reed Richards, don't leave us hanging.
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I would have powered it with an electronium cell that harnesses the power of sunspots to produce cognitive radiation, and harvested that.
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I would have designed the probe to utilize the radiation as a power source, prolonging the mission. I don't understand why the mission planners didn't utilize this obvious power source but I'm sure they had their reasons. I would have done things completely differently.
Having adequate power was not a problem to begin with. Using local radiation as a power source, even if it made sense, doesn't preclude the damage it would cause to the rest of the craft.
Re: Radiation (Score:4, Funny)
LED diode (Score:2)
"LED diode" ? What's that ?
It's like a Led Zeppelin, but with a diode.
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An example of RAS Syndrome.
Re:Radiation (Score:5, Informative)
The probe will fail due to radiation exposure, but the orbit was designed to minimize that.
Right. Here's a good picture of the perijove, skimming in under the radiation belts: http://www.catherineq.com/wp-c... [catherineq.com]
Note that each orbit the perijove has precesses slightly (due to perturbations because Jupiter is not perfectly spherical), so after some time the orbit will go through (instead of under) the belts.
Here's an "infographic" with more information: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def... [nasa.gov]
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If you're into planetary-scale goatses, perhaps you'd like to check out the north pole of Saturn some time.
Okay. That didn't come out quite as I'd intended.
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I thought the poles might be up your alley.
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If you're into planetary-scale goatses, perhaps you'd like to check out the north pole of Saturn some time.
You may even go up to Uranus (or down, depending...)
I think that should win a meterological award (Score:2)
Best weather reporting of the year.
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But the important question is... (Score:2)
Do they have a GoFundMe page for their next picture-taking trip?
I'd contribute [Re:But the important question...] (Score:2)
Do they have a GoFundMe page for their next picture-taking trip?
I'd contribute to that one!
Voyager 1 did it better IMHO (Score:2, Informative)
Red spot from Voyager 1 in the 1970's [newtimes.pl]
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It's too early to know because the Juno pics have yet to be re-reprocessed, combined, and enhanced to their fullest.
Here's the results of an amateur's re-processing of Voyager photos. [internapcdn.net] Great PC wall-paper.
An amateur has more freedom to tease out detail than NASA, who could risk being accused of "embellishing" if they overdo it. You can't fire an amateur/hobbyist.
Source:
https://phys.org/news/2015-06-... [phys.org]
By the way, the Great Red Spot has shrunk by about 20% since Voyager.
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9000km, or 5600miles, in context (Score:2)
To put the distance over the great red spot in context, it's the equivalent of taking a photograph of Buenos Aires, or Cairo, or Jerusalem, from New York City.
From New York City, all of Canada, North and Central America, most of South America, all of Europe, and the vast majority of Russia are all contained within that distance. (ie, all of those places would be closer to you than the red spot was from Juno as it passed overhead).
In terms of orbital distances:
- geostationary orbit around the Earth (where a
Re: 9000km, or 5600miles, in context (Score:2)
Correct. I put the radius, not the altitude. Oops.
Thanks for the correction.
Can you imagine (Score:2)
waiting for a storm to clear on Jupiter?
Actual Photos (Score:4, Informative)
If you want the actual photos without all of the fake assery all the links show you, click this: https://www.missionjuno.swri.e... [swri.edu]
Yesterday email; today, Mars (Score:2)
Robotic Probes FTW (Score:2)
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Robotic exploration is absolutely the right tasks for this bit of exploration, if only due to the radiation environment around Jupiter. I don't think anyone argues that robotic missions don't have value.
As a comparison, lets look at the Curiosity rover on mars. As of Late January this year, it had driven a total of 15km on Mars in roughly 1700 days. It's done a lot of really great work, but it's slow, painstaking, and somewhat limited. If you were to put a human field geologist on Mars, with an appropriate
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"The United States didn't fund the Apollo mission to collect science data on the moon, they did it to beat the Russians."
And the US will go back to the Moon or Mars no matter the cost to beat China or Russia. The government can spend any amount of money they want with buy in from the public. There were government officials opposed to spending the money to go to the moon but the US vs. Russia angle got the public buy in and the Senators who did not want to spend the money had no choice but to agree or face a
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If the US public would get over its obsession with spam-in-a-can, we could have a hundred times as many projects like this.
Not really. No money is actually being spent on manned missions to other planets, so if it was all shifted to probe based missions, it still wouldn't be any more. They talk about manned missions a lot but the matter of the fact is that we aren't spending money on the wrong priorities, but just simply aren't spending money.
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