NASA Releases New Photos of Jupiter - and a Recording of Its Moon that Sounds Like R2-D2 (adn.com) 23
"As it seeks answers about the cosmos and what they mean for Earth's origins, NASA on Friday announced a slew of discoveries about Jupiter," reports the Washington Post
"And scientists brought home an interstellar tune from the road."
The Juno spacecraft is gathering data about the origin of the solar system's biggest planet — in which more than 1,300 Earths could fit. Among its recent findings are photos from inside the planet's ring, a map of its magnetic field, details of its atmosphere and a trippy soundtrack from a spacecraft's travels around one of its moons.
But it's not exactly a song, or even perceptible to the human ear.
The radio emissions Juno recorded are not what a person would hear if they went to Jupiter — space is a vacuum and does not carry soundwaves like air does on Earth. But the probe zooming through space captured the electric and magnetic emissions that scientists later converted into perceptible sound. Turns out, orbiting Ganymede, which is one of Jupiter's moons and the largest satellite in the solar system, kind of sounds like R2-D2.
Launched in 2011, became the eighth spacecraft to ever reach Jupiter in 2016, "and the first to probe below the giant planet's thick gas cover.
"It fought Jupiter's extreme temperatures and hazardous radiation to survey its north and south poles, chugging along despite a lack of sunshine on its solar panels."
"And scientists brought home an interstellar tune from the road."
The Juno spacecraft is gathering data about the origin of the solar system's biggest planet — in which more than 1,300 Earths could fit. Among its recent findings are photos from inside the planet's ring, a map of its magnetic field, details of its atmosphere and a trippy soundtrack from a spacecraft's travels around one of its moons.
But it's not exactly a song, or even perceptible to the human ear.
The radio emissions Juno recorded are not what a person would hear if they went to Jupiter — space is a vacuum and does not carry soundwaves like air does on Earth. But the probe zooming through space captured the electric and magnetic emissions that scientists later converted into perceptible sound. Turns out, orbiting Ganymede, which is one of Jupiter's moons and the largest satellite in the solar system, kind of sounds like R2-D2.
Launched in 2011, became the eighth spacecraft to ever reach Jupiter in 2016, "and the first to probe below the giant planet's thick gas cover.
"It fought Jupiter's extreme temperatures and hazardous radiation to survey its north and south poles, chugging along despite a lack of sunshine on its solar panels."
R2D2 (Score:2)
R2-D2 is basically beeps of random tones and durations. So yeah, anything can sound like that. When I was around 8 or 9 I copied or wrote a program on a Commodore 128 that basically made random beeps and I recall thinking it sounded just like R2D2. I think it was 5 lines of BASIC code.
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Its R2 climaxing with a Peloton
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The mental image of the instructor's words being mistaken for words of passion...
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Correction: "It's"
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Glad you clarified that, I was thinking R2-D2 owned an R2 unit that was doing that.
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My sarcasm detector doesn't work on Mondays. Was that sarcasm?
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Yes.
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Re:R2D2 (Score:5, Informative)
It's called public outreach.
This technique is common enough that NASA probably has a program lying around to do this. Feed in the EM recordings, out comes sound. The reason for doing this is that it allows an alternate presentation of the data, in a form that's understandable by people with no scientific background. It takes a few hours tops, and you have some news that will be picked up by mainstream news outlets and remind the public we have a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter.
Alternate data presentations are common: false-color images, graphs, etc.
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"public outreach"
Quite correct.
But of course there are some useful scientific objectives to this research. These sounds are demodulated audio from radio waves captured from the magnetosphere surrounding Jupiter and Ganymede. Electromagnetic energy in the ELF/VLF/LF range (0-60kHz) from lighting and other discharges are trapped in magnetic force lines and circulated through the magnetosphere. Juno has a onboard electric dipole and magnetic search coil to receive E and B signals in this frequency emitted from
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For one: the original source at NASA [nasa.gov] makes no mention of R2D2 - that was added by the journalist.
Second: changing these spectral measurements into sound recordings is common practice, and has been for decades (long before social media, long before the world-wide-web!). NASA is not the only ones that do it: any time you have some spectrum vs intensity vs time data, you can change map it into sound. You can
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Right? I don't understand the point of converting it into sound at all. Seems like a pointless waste of time and money.
Human beings are great at data interpretation using various senses. We can look at a spectrograph and scratch our heads as it's just a bunch of lines bouncing around, but when converted to audio it becomes a recording of Taylorswift singing "haters gonna hate". We can listen to a bunch of random noise which in image is converted to a photograph.
Even within a given medium we can learn more through manipulation. Our eyes are more sensitive to deviations in white than black which is why often you may come acro
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There's a number of different sounds involved including chirps, whines and whistles. R2D2 sounds like a bird to me.
Okay so (Score:3)
No protomolecule, right?
Link to the source! (Score:4, Informative)
I'll note that the NASA release makes no mention of R2-D2.
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I'll note that the NASA release makes no mention of R2-D2.
That's because they are just a bunch of government Trekkies rather than true Starwars Nerds.
The R2-D2ish effect sounds like sampling artifact (Score:2)
The impression I get from listening to the published sound:
The R2-D2ish beepity-beepity effect sounds like an over-compression artifact. Like taking short samples of the signal and interpolating between the samples by extending each into the gap until the next sample, or taking chunky sections of the signal, identifying the energy in each of a number of narrow frequency bands, and assuming it was evenly distributed in time across the time slot, rather than present only for part of the slot (as when a varyi
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Well, I thought it sounded cool.
If I'm not mistaken, because it's NASA, it's in the public domain, which means I could use it as a lead in for a post-apocalyptic metal ballad. That is, if I ever get the time to record a metal ballad...