NASA Releases First-Ever Close-Up Images of Jupiter's North Pole (npr.org) 54
NASA has released the first close-up images of Jupiter's north pole captured by the Juno spacecraft, taken during the probe's first flyby of the planet with its instruments switched on. "The images show storm systems and weather activity unlike anything previously seen on any of our solar system's gas-giant planets," writes Tony Greicius via NASA. NPR reports: "NASA also released an image of Jupiter's southern aurora, a unique view that could be captured only by a spacecraft close to Jupiter. The aurora occurs when energized particles from the sun interact with Jupiter's atmosphere near the planet's poles. The space agency also released audio of what the aurora sounds like if you convert it to a frequency the human ear can hear. The pictures and data were collected Aug. 27, when June made the first of some three dozen scheduled close encounters with Jupiter. At its closest approach, the spacecraft was a mere 2,500 miles above the planet's cloud tops." The images can be found here. You can also listen to Jupiter's auroras via YouTube. Spoiler: they sound like a dial-up modem.
Re: Santa? (Score:1)
Because of its unique magnetic field Jupiter in fact has 17 north poles, providing the much needed floor space that Santa needed with Earth's population explosion.
Not a dial-up modem. (Score:3)
That really doesn't sound anything like a dial-up modem, but I think I know what it is.
It's just the newest Aphex Twin release. [youtube.com]
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To me it sounds like Darth Vader stuck in a jet engine, especially the middle part.
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Impressive... (Score:2)
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I was in Hell [wikipedia.org] just a couple of weeks ago--didn't see any sign of it there.
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Good to know I'm not the only person underwhelmed by Juno.
I tried to get myself excited about this one, but I just can't. The target is way down on my list of "unsolved things in the solar system to investigate", and the mission profile uninteresting. I was telling myself, well, at least you're going to get a bunch of pretty pictures out of it. Well, honestly, these aren't that great, and this was the closest pass. The quality is underwhelming, and at least to my eye the poles look basically like the re
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This is primarily a plasma physics experiment in an environment more extreme than what we've looked at before. We've learned a lot about fundamental plasma physics and space weather from simple satellites in high Earth orbit or solar orbits near the Earth. Many of those had no cameras at all, and were virtually unmentioned in popular news (or even Slashdot...). The results of such work can have actual, practical terrestrial impact, as the results are often heavily used and cited by work trying to underst
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And how many of them cost $1,1B?
I'm not talking about "pretty pictures" either. You consider "the internal structure and weather of Jupiter" as pretty high up there on the priority list. How does that even compare to other things we could be spending our money on? Let me just toss a couple examples out there.
* Finding out whether the solar syst
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And how many of them cost $1,1B?
The Cluster mission cost about $700 M (2016 USD) originally close to the original Juno budget of $700M... but the suffered launch failure and was important enough that they spent another $350 M to rebuild and relaunch... so yeah, a total of more than a billion dollars. The results from this were impressive enough that NASA is building an updated version of the mission, MMS, with a $950M budget... that is now going to go over by $100-200M from the looks of things.
I'm not talking about "pretty pictures" either.
Let me quote your previous post:
I was telling myself, well, at least you're going to get a bunch of pretty pictures out of it. Well, honestly, these aren't that great, and this was the closest pass. The quality is underwhelming, and at least to my eye the poles look basically like the rest of the planet, just with more upwelling-driven storms and less banding effects.
You didn't j
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So we're going to combine Cluster and Cluster II to try to find something even close in terms of budget, are we? Which together represent a total of 8 separate satellites built in the largest orbital plasma science mission conducted to date, taught us far more a
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Without the extended mission NH still provided vastly more compelling science than Juno will in its entire mission. Seriously, "better quantifying Jupiter's already fairly quantified plasma environment", or "finding that something that we thought was a dead iceball has its mantle actively convecting on its surface, active photochemistry in its atmosphere, precipitation and glaciation of multiple substance, evidence of possible surface liquids in its past, cryovolcanoes, terrains like the "snakeskin" that w
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Yeah, just go ahead and drop me a line when we get another 3000 papers out of Jun
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I'll add, concerning manned exploration:
Don't get me wrong, I do support the eventual expansion of the human species into space. I think it's an important goal to have on the horizon. What I don't support is the concept that it must be done "soon", at the sort of prices that today's missions cost. And I strongly oppose attempts to justify the cost with "science". ISS, for example, at $150B is the most expensive structure ever made. Yes, it absolutely has returned useful data. But $150B worth of data?
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Rather than returning an asteroid sample to Earth, I would rather see a probe that could expand on Rosetta-style station keeping to make multiple contacts with an asteroid and do microscopic analysis of its surface at each place. Such an asteroidal assay mission would be the first step toward mining.
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Oh, and just for the snark value I would name my mission New Gunner Girls.
Not Frist Probe (Score:2)
Actually, Pioneer 11 did it first [nasa.gov] in the mid 1970's
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If these fucking morons at NASA would put higher quality cameras on their probes, maybe they wouldn't have so much trouble getting funding. The public wants to see pretty photos. Boring graphs of magnetometer readings may be good science, but it doesn't grab anyone's imagination.
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So fuck you, you useless piece of shit.
You see that? That kind of disrespect towards the TAXPAYERS is the reason NASA's funding keeps getting cut. Keep it up ivory tower eggheads. In a few years you won't have two nickels to rub together.
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Such images are much more useful if combined with multiple instrument types to know the context. For example, image a spot that you also can beam radar off of, and image in multiple wavelengths to see different layers and estimate chemical composition (spectrography).
But of course all that requires a bigger payload, especially when sufficiently padded against Jupiter's unforgiving radiation.
Imaging of clouds is also more useful if one can take time-lapse images. But Juno's orbit is not well-suited for that.
What it means (Score:1)
Typo? (Score:1)
The probe is named "Juno", as in Mrs Jove. You know, Jupiter's first wife.
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Cheap, Fast, Good -- you have selected "None of the Above"?
To all those wanting pretty pictures. (Score:5, Interesting)
Whiners: You know what? Fuck you. (Score:2)
TL;DR: Shut up about the fucking camera. That is not why Juno is there, and it is the best camera we know how to build for that environment.
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Juno is not there to fill your porn cache with superficial visible light dick pics Jupiter.
Juno is orbiting in the second most actively destructive (for a probe) orbital environment in this solar system. The only one worse is the coronal atmosphere of Sol.... and there is nothing we know how to build that would survive there for long enough to justify the attem