Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by mrpg on Friday June 08 2018, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-liked-the-movie dept.

NASA has extended the Juno mission for 3 more years. It was previously scheduled to deorbit and collide with Jupiter in July 2018. JunoCam is expected to fail before the end of the mission due to radiation damage:

NASA has officially announced that its $1 billion Juno mission is getting a critical life extension to study planet Jupiter. Instead of being crashed into the planet's cloud tops next month, Juno will fly until at least July 2021, according to a press release issued on Thursday by the Southwest Research Institute, which operates the pinwheel-shaped, tennis-court-size robot.

Business Insider reported on Monday that Juno's mission would be extended. The probe has orbited Jupiter since July 2015, but engine trouble forced scientists to collect data about four times more slowly than they'd originally hoped. "Juno needs more time to gather our planned scientific measurements," Scott Bolton, the Juno mission's leader and a planetary scientist at the SwRI, told Gizmodo on Tuesday.

See also: The Mystery of Insane Lightning Storms on Jupiter Has Finally Been Solved

Prevalent lightning sferics at 600 megahertz near Jupiter's poles (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0156-5) (DX)

Discovery of rapid whistlers close to Jupiter implying lightning rates similar to those on Earth (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0442-z) (DX)

Related: JunoCam Works, First New Images From Jupiter Sent Back
Juno Captures Best Ever Images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot
Jupiter's Auroras Powered by Particles from Io
Depth of Jupiter's Great Red Spot Studied, and Two New Radiation Zones Found
Great Storms of Jupiter and Neptune Are Disappearing


Original Submission

Related Stories

JunoCam Works, First New Images From Jupiter Sent Back 27 comments

Some of Juno's instruments have been successfully turned on, including the JunoCam, and a new view of Jupiter has been obtained from 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away from the planet, showing the Great Red Spot and three of the gas giant's moons.

The best images of Jupiter will be taken on August 27th after the next flyby:

"This scene from JunoCam indicates it survived its first pass through Jupiter's extreme radiation environment without any degradation and is ready to take on Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "We can't wait to see the first view of Jupiter's poles."

[...] During its mission of exploration, Juno will circle the Jovian world 37 times, soaring low over the planet's cloud tops -- as close as about 2,600 miles (4,100 kilometers). During these flybys, Juno will probe beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and study its auroras to learn more about the planet's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

So take the image you see now with interest, and await imagery with over 1,000× the resolution.

Here's the main mission page, as well as a site that purports to allow voting on future observation points sometime in the near future.


Original Submission

Juno Captures Best Ever Images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot 4 comments

Juno gets up close and personal with Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is one of its most iconic features. The giant storm, which has been raging in the atmosphere of the gas giant for at least hundreds of years, is larger than Earth and can be seen easily even with an amateur telescope. But despite its size and prominence, the Great Red Spot is a mystery that continues to intrigue planetary scientists. Now, NASA's Juno probe has returned the best ever images of the Great Red Spot, following its most recent close flyby of our solar system's largest planet July 10.

The pictures the probe returned are stunning. As it passed over the Great Red Spot at a height of 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers), Juno's imaging camera, JunoCam, snapped several apple core-shaped photos of the feature in optical light. But pretty pictures weren't Juno's only goal; all of the spacecraft's eight additional instruments recorded data during the flyby as well. Those instruments include a magnetometer, a radio and plasma wave sensor, a microwave radiometer, and an ultraviolet spectrograph. By combining the multi-wavelength data from these state-of-the-art instruments, scientists can create a more complete model of the storm than ever before.

"These highly-anticipated images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot are the 'perfect storm' of art and science. With data from Voyager, Galileo, New Horizons, Hubble and now Juno, we have a better understanding of the composition and evolution of this iconic feature," said Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science, in a press release.

Also at Spaceflight Now and KQED. JunoCam Image Processing Gallery.

Previously: Juno to Image Jupiter's Great Red Spot on July 10th


Original Submission

Jupiter's Auroras Powered by Particles from Io 5 comments

For the first time ever, NASA's Juno spacecraft has spotted electrons being fired down into Jupiter's atmosphere at up to 400,000 volts. That's an enormous amount of energy that gives rise to the planet's glowing auroras. These incredibly high voltages, however, are only spotted occasionally — and that's raising questions about what exactly is behind some of the planet's most vivid glows at the poles.

The discovery, detailed in a study published today in Nature, was made possible by the instruments on board Juno, which has been orbiting Jupiter for a little over a year, passing by the poles closer than any other spacecraft has before. It confirms, in part, what astronomers expected, but it also shows that Jupiter's auroras behave differently than auroras on Earth — through processes that we don't fully understand yet.

Auroras, on both Earth and Jupiter, are formed when charged particles like electrons spiral down a planet's magnetic field lines, entering the atmosphere and creating a glow. On Earth, the most intense auroras are caused by solar storms, which occur when high-energy particles ejected from the Sun rain down on our planet. When these particles enter the atmosphere, they interact with gases and make the sky glow red, green, and blue at the poles. On Jupiter, auroras are formed by particles ejected mostly from the Io, the planet's moon. Io's volcanoes spew huge amounts of sulfur and oxygen into space, loading Jupiter's magnetic field with particles.

[...] "We've never flown right over the poles of Jupiter before," says Jonathan Nichols, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester, who did not take part in the study. "So Juno is telling us about those particles for the first time."

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/6/16256926/nasa-juno-jupiter-auroras-electrons


Original Submission

Depth of Jupiter's Great Red Spot Studied, and Two New Radiation Zones Found 3 comments

NASA's Juno Probes the Depths of Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Data collected by NASA's Juno spacecraft during its first pass over Jupiter's Great Red Spot in July 2017 indicate that this iconic feature penetrates well below the clouds. Other revelations from the mission include that Jupiter has two previously uncharted radiation zones. The findings were announced Monday at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans.

"One of the most basic questions about Jupiter's Great Red Spot is: how deep are the roots?" said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Juno data indicate that the solar system's most famous storm is almost one-and-a-half Earths wide, and has roots that penetrate about 200 miles (300 kilometers) into the planet's atmosphere."

[...] Juno also has detected a new radiation zone, just above the gas giant's atmosphere, near the equator. The zone includes energetic hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur ions moving at almost light speed. [...] Juno also found signatures of a high-energy heavy ion population within the inner edges of Jupiter's relativistic electron radiation belt -- a region dominated by electrons moving close to the speed of light. The signatures are observed during Juno's high-latitude encounters with the electron belt, in regions never explored by prior spacecraft. The origin and exact species of these particles is not yet understood. Juno's Stellar Reference Unit (SRU-1) star camera detects the signatures of this population as extremely high noise signatures in images collected by the mission's radiation monitoring investigation.


Original Submission

Great Storms of Jupiter and Neptune Are Disappearing 28 comments

The most famous atmospheric features of both Jupiter and Neptune may be gone soon:

When we think of storms on the other planets in our Solar System, we automatically think of Jupiter. Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a fixture in our Solar System, and has lasted 200 years or more. But the storms on Neptune are different: they're transient.

[...] "It looks like we're capturing the demise of this dark vortex, and it's different from what well-known studies led us to expect," said Michael H. Wong of the University of California at Berkeley, referring to work by Ray LeBeau (now at St. Louis University) and Tim Dowling's team at the University of Louisville. "Their dynamical simulations said that anticyclones under Neptune's wind shear would probably drift toward the equator. We thought that once the vortex got too close to the equator, it would break up and perhaps create a spectacular outburst of cloud activity."

Rather than going out in some kind of notable burst of activity, this storm is just fading away. And it's also not drifting toward the equator as expected, but is making its way toward the south pole. Again, the inevitable comparison is with Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS). The GRS is held in place by the prominent storm bands in Jupiter's atmosphere. And those bands move in alternating directions, constraining the movement of the GRS. Neptune doesn't have those bands, so it's thought that storms on Neptune would tend to drift to the equator, rather than toward the south pole.

Neptune's Great Dark Spot may not have the support of atmospheric storm bands, but Jupiter's Great Red Spot is also on the decline:

A ferocious storm has battered Jupiter for at least 188 years. From Earth, it is observed as red swirling clouds racing counter-clockwise in what is known as the planet's "Great Red Spot." But after shrinking for centuries, it may now be on the brink of disappearing for good.

"In truth, the GRS [Great Red Spot] has been shrinking for a long time," lead Juno mission team member and planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Glenn Orton told Business Insider in an email. "The GRS will in a decade or two become the GRC (Great Red Circle). Maybe sometime after that the GRM"—the Great Red Memory.


Original Submission

Juno Spacecraft Captures Images of Volcanic Plume on Jupiter's Moon Io 1 comment

Volcanic Plume on Jupiter's Moon Io Spied by Juno Spacecraft

NASA's Juno spacecraft has captured an intriguing image of a volcanic plume straddling the line between day and night on Jupiter's notoriously eruptive moon Io.

The image is part of a larger data set gathered on the spacecraft's Dec. 21 close skim over the planet's surface, when four of Juno's cameras spent more than an hour watching the volcanic moon's pole. All told, the observations are a nice scientific bonus for the Juno team, because the spacecraft's primary job is to study Jupiter itself.

"We knew we were breaking new ground with a multispectral campaign to view Io's polar region, but no one expected we would get so lucky as to see an active volcanic plume shooting material off the moon's surface," Scott Bolton, principal investigator of the Juno mission, said in a statement released by the Southwest Research Institute, which contributed two instruments to the mission. "This is quite a New Year's present, showing us that Juno has the ability to clearly see plumes."

Previously: Jupiter's Auroras Powered by Particles from Io
NASA's Juno Mission to Jupiter Extended for 3 Years


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @05:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @05:57AM (#690226)
  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday June 08 2018, @10:29AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday June 08 2018, @10:29AM (#690262) Homepage
    That this isn't the *mission* being extended at all - it's just the deadline to achieve the mission has been pushed back, and they've not run up against a sunk-cost nazi.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @02:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @02:19PM (#690324)
  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @09:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @09:26PM (#690519)
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @03:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @03:57PM (#690814)
(1)