New Images of Jupiter from Juno

Juno has sent back additional images showing Jupiter up close.  It includes the "never-before-seen perspective" on Jupiter's south pole, shown below.  Go here for more from NASA. 

Juno Completes First Jupiter Flyby

NASA reported that the Juno spacecraft completed its first of 36 planned flybys of Jupiter.

Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, stated:

We are getting some intriguing early data returns as we speak...It will take days for all the science data collected during the flyby to be downlinked and even more to begin to comprehend what Juno and Jupiter are trying to tell us.

The image above is the first of many coming our way. 

Great image: Juno's Insertion

This impressive image is a digital painting created by Mathias Verhasselt depicting Juno during its orbital insertion burn over Jupiter.  You can find an assortment of similarly fascinating images at the Bruce Murray Space Image Library on The Planetary Society's website. 

Great Image: Juno Approaching Jupiter

NASA has released the first images showing the Juno spacecraft's view of Jupiter and its surroundings. The picture, taken July 10, shows Jupiter and three of its moons, including Europa. Hopefully, we will visit Europa in the near future as a separate mission. 

As with the early images from the Pluto mission last year, this is just the start of some great images. 

Light Show on Jupiter

Good news! The Juno spacecraft is safely in orbit around Jupiter. 

The image above is a composite from the Hubble Space Telescope showing the gas giants amazing auroras just prior to Juno's arrival.

I expect we will learn much more about the unique properties of Jupiter as Juno starts its research mission. 

Stay tuned.

Juno Approaches Jupiter

I remember a lot more excitement about New Horizions approaching Pluto, yet the Juno mission to Jupiter is also an impressive feat.

On July 4th we will have another reason to look up into the sky and celebrate as Juno goes into orbit around Jupiter after a trip that lastest five years. Juno will orbit the planet for about 20 months. 

The goal of the mission is to

...understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter, look for solid planetary core, map magnetic field, measure water and ammonia in deep atmosphere, [and] observe auroras.

That's quite a list of duties and a good reason to stay connected to the mission. So remember to celebrate on the 4th.

Babylonian Astronomy

So it seems Jupiter's orbit was being accurately measured and monitored at least 1,500 years earlier than initially believed. That right, the Babylonians were ahead of their times and only later did Oxford scientists pick up where they left off. 

An article in Nature notes:

The inscriptions on the tablets show that they measured the daily apparent velocity of Jupiter (as seen from Earth) at different dates in its orbit. Then they used these velocities and times to deduce the distance that Jupiter must have travelled during the intervening period. That calculation is equivalent to the geometrical notion of plotting velocity against time, and calculating the area under that plot.

This discovery was made by science historian Mathieu Ossendrijver at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The  tablets now belong to the British Museum in London. One can only wonder what else sits quietly in a dark corner of the museum awaiting discovery.

ESA, Europa, and the Moon

So now the European Space Agency wants to join NASA on its trip to Europa.  That is good for international cooperation and funding since ESA may contribute about $550 million related to a separate probe.  NASA already has about $2 billion in funding for the mission.  Alvaro Gimenez, ESA’s director of science and robotic exploration. stated:

We are ready and interested...As I said to my colleague in the U.S., we cannot allow Americans to go to Europa without Europeans. We have to be part of it. We think that it is natural, but certainly we will not lead, so we have to wait.

I am surprised since ESA has its own plans for Europa via the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE).  Both the NASA mission and JUICE are slated for 2022.  It could make sense for ESA to contribute to the NASA mission and vice versa to double the chances that the two space agencies will get a craft to Europa.

That does not mean both space agencies see eye-to-eye on all future missions, particularly manned missions.  While NASA seems to be aiming for manned missions to Mars, the European Space Agency (ESA) is gunning for the occupation of the Moon.  In this video, Destination: Moon, ESA discusses how we have explored only a part of the Moon, highlights the need to determine how much water is really below the surface, points out the advantages of a telescope outside of Earth's interference, and recommends an international Moon base similar to the arrangement in Antarctica.

While many in the United States would say "been there, done that," ESA makes a convincing argument that more can be learned about the Moon and thereby the Earth.  This would be much better than our decades in low-Earth orbit, but not as sexy as Mars.  Maybe ESA could lead the lunar mission while NASA focuses on Mars.  Of course, with Russia and China also planning manned missions to the Moon, I expect the United States might feel left out.  But we can still be there, if only "leading from behind," with some of our heavy-lift rockets and hard-earned expertise. It has been a long time since we had astronauts on the Moon and a permanent mission sounds like a good idea for everyone involved.

Update: To be fair, ESA contributed about $470 million to the Orion service module, indicating plenty of support for a manned Mars mission. It appears ESA is hoping such support may provide a spot for a European astronaut on the trip to Mars. That is cheaper and smarter than funding a separate mission. 

Alien Ocean: NASA's Mission to Europa

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released this video on NASA's planned mission to Jupiter's moon Europa.  It discusses the space agency's plan to send a spacecraft to conduct flybys of the moon to better understand its composition, its presumed liquid water oceans, and its potential for life.  Unlike other missions that orbit the object being observed, the radiation around the moon would soon cook any nearby spacecraft.  So instead NASA hopes that multiple flybys, and even a potential fly-through of any plumes, will provide us with the necessary information to make some solid determinations about Europa. It is an ambitious plan, but as spacecraft such as Galileo, Voyager, Cassini, New Horizons, and others have proven, we are up to the task.

Great Images: Jupiter and Ganymede

This image is part of the NASA Planetary Photo Journal Collection and found at nasaimages.org. Here is the photo's accompanying text:

The solar system's largest moon, Ganymede, is captured here alongside the planet Jupiter in a color picture taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Dec. 3, 2000.

Ganymede is larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto and Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Both Ganymede and Titan have greater surface area than the entire Eurasian continent on our planet. Cassini was 26.5 million kilometers (16.5 million miles) from Ganymede when this image was taken. The smallest visible features are about 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) across.

The bright area near the south (bottom) of Ganymede is Osiris, a large, relatively new crater surrounded by bright icy material ejected by the impact, which created it. Elsewhere, Ganymede displays dark terrains that NASA's Voyager and Galileo spacecraft have shown to be old and heavily cratered. The brighter terrains are younger and laced by grooves. Various kinds of grooved terrains have been seen on many icy moons in the solar system. These are believed to be the surface expressions of warm, pristine, water-rich materials that moved to the surface and froze.

Ganymede has proven to be a fascinating world, the only moon known to have a magnetosphere, or magnetic environment, produced by a convecting metal core. The interaction of Ganymede's and Jupiter's magnetospheres may produce dazzling variations in the auroral glows in Ganymede's tenuous atmosphere of oxygen.

Cassini is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. 

Here is an earlier shot of Ganymede from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Photojournal page:  

In this global view of Ganymede's trailing side, the colors are enhanced to emphasize color differences. The enhancement reveals frosty polar caps in addition to the two predominant terrains on Ganymede, bright, grooved terrain and older, dark furrowed areas. Many craters with diameters up to several dozen kilometers are visible. The violet hues at the poles may be the result of small particles of frost which would scatter more light at shorter wavelengths (the violet end of the spectrum). Ganymede's magnetic field, which was detected by the magnetometer on NASA's Galileo spacecraft in 1996, may be partly responsible for the appearance of the polar terrain. Compared to Earth's polar caps, Ganymede's polar terrain is relatively vast. The frost on Ganymede reaches latitudes as low as 40 degrees on average and 25 degrees at some locations. For comparison with Earth, Miami, Florida lies at 26 degrees north latitude, and Berlin, Germany is located at 52 degrees north.

North is to the top of the picture. The composite, which combines images taken with green, violet, and 1 micrometer filters, is centered at 306 degrees west longitude. The resolution is 9 kilometers (6 miles) per picture element. The images were taken on 29 March 1998 at a range of 918000 kilometers (570,000 miles) by the Solid State Imaging (SSI) system on NASA's Galileo spacecraft.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC.