Juno was something about radar - penetrating the cloud layers to see what was below. In college my son worked on the FFT engine that processed the radar data. He has code circling Jupiter!
That's really cool, something to be proud of :)
New images of Jupiter
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Re: New images of Jupiter
#32How hard is it to send something there to give us a 24/7 feed of the planet from a fixed angle?
Pretty difficult.
Jupiters sphere of influence is full of radiation, meaning the sat needs a lot of shielding which makes it very heavy. Additionally, you need a lot of thrust to not only get to Jupiter, but to be able to get into a geosync orbit around a planet other than earth, so youre gonna need a lot of fuel. And finally, time... Europa Clipper just left earth, it will be 8 years before it arrives at jupiter. The windows for launch are long but very spread out, so mission timing would be important too.
And, funfacts time.. Clipper is going to europa but will be spending much of its time in orbit around jupiter, passing closely to europa every orbit. This was done to limit the amount of radiation the sat will get during its mission, and that orbit is uuuge, in order to avoid as much of the radiation as possible.
The area of Jupiter and its moons is probably one of the most hostile space environments in our system, catching asteroids, radiation, huge planet full of gasses that would corrode you and your ship if you dipped in, and a huge gravity well that makes it difficult to leave again once youre there. Not many other planets in our system are as dangerous as jupiter and friends.
Re: New images of Jupiter
#33Alien feel (and even unsettling at times).
I guess we have grown used to this by now, but from the Moon landing pictures, to the Mars rovers and the various asteroid and planetary missions the objects of the Solar system are now vivid, complex and above all, "real" places.
Re: New images of Jupiter
#34Breathtaking! Just imagine, a century from now, maybe later or sooner, we could visit planets like Jupiter, that once, we could only look at them from the photo. I hope the humanity lives on, and strives forward in engineering.
Re: New images of Jupiter
#35Juno was something about radar - penetrating the cloud layers to see what was below. In college my son worked on the FFT engine that processed the radar data. He has code circling Jupiter!
I worked with a guy once back in the 80s who did the radar preamp on Pioneer Venus I believe it was. Very bright individual.
Re: New images of Jupiter
#36How hard is it to send something there to give us a 24/7 feed of the planet from a fixed angle?
Pretty difficult. Jupiters sphere of influence is full of radiation, meaning the sat needs a lot of shielding which makes it very heavy. Additionally, you need a lot of thrust to not only get to Jupiter, but to be able to get into a geosync orbit around a planet other than earth, so youre gonna need a lot of fuel. And finally, time... Europa Clipper just left earth, it will be 8 years before it arrives at jupiter. Th…
I was under the impression that we now know how to do low-fuel paths through the solar system using gravity. It's more a question of how long do you want to take to get where you're going.
Re: New images of Jupiter
#37It's so scary! All those swirls are like planet size hurricanes. Had Jupiter been bigger, it would have been a star, and life on earth would not have existed. Gives me chills.
Jupiter would need to weigh 13 times its current mass to become a brown dwarf, and about 83 to 85 times its mass to become a low-mass star [1] [1]: https://www.astronomy.com/science/ask-astro-could-jupiter-ev...
Earth's mass is something times 10^24. Jupiter's mass is 2 x 10^27. The smallest stars are 8 x 10^28.
On an exponential scale, Jupiter is closer to being a star than it is to being Earth. So... maybe you could say that Jupiter is almost a star. With such loose definitions talking about astronomical scales, there's a lot of room for interpretation and exaggeration.
I think the point is--in the spirit of appreciating Jupiter--Jupiter resembles the largest possible planets.
Re: New images of Jupiter
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything that reminds me that we are living in an environment thin as an eggshell on a grain of sand surrounded by an infinite cold and deadly vacuum, punctuated by hellfires that would evaporate our hole planet if we got to close. There are so preciously few places like Earth. How I wish more of us cared about it.
It doesn't care about us, and we don't need to "care" for it, it's going to be fine without us. What we don't do is care for ourselves, which is what you're really saying, self-preservation. The earth doesn't give two shits if it's 50 degrees warmer. You can't even say it's to protect life, because some forms of life will do way better in a warmer planet too. The universe / nature is gnarly already, much more than we…
I can't help find such edgy cynism nothing else than juvenile. Yeah, sure, in the end nothing matters and the universe doesn't give a fuck about you.
And life on earth is just an accident, and that intelligence and consciousness exists here for a very brief time on the universe's path to heath death doesn't matter at all. Except of us poor conscious beings who find joy in being alive and actually have the capacity to marvel, because it is marvellous that we can, and we should.
And I care that it is us who inhabits the earth, and not slugs.
Re: New images of Jupiter
#39These come from Juno, a mission sent in 2011 and orbiting Jupiter since 2016. Must say it wasn't really on my radar anymore, but looking at the timeline on Wikipedia, it's still going around and getting close ("perijove") every month and a week or so, at an ever-increasing longitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)#Timeline The planned end of the mission is in about a year. The camera was "included in…
Yeah, they had to fight so hard to get that camera on there! It was not included in the initial designs since it wasn't necessary for the science objectives.
Re: New images of Jupiter
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty difficult. Jupiters sphere of influence is full of radiation, meaning the sat needs a lot of shielding which makes it very heavy. Additionally, you need a lot of thrust to not only get to Jupiter, but to be able to get into a geosync orbit around a planet other than earth, so youre gonna need a lot of fuel. And finally, time... Europa Clipper just left earth, it will be 8 years before it arrives at jupiter. Th…
I was under the impression that we now know how to do low-fuel paths through the solar system using gravity. It's more a question of how long do you want to take to get where you're going.
If you want to go faster, you need more fuel, and eventually you max out the biggest rocket available. Clipper is the most massive planetary probe ever-- they had to use falcon heavy in fully expendable mode to get it up there.