The Great Red Sunburn

Jupiter has one of the largest planetary atmospheres in the solar system, with three atmosphere layers made up of ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide and water clouds at different altitudes.   As chaotic and beautiful Jupiter's atmosphere is, the great red spot out-shines them all.

The Great Red Spot is a vortex the size of three Earths.  Researchers have been theorising for hundreds of years as to the cause of the Great Red Spot's color. Up until recently it was thought that the color was some kind of red phosphorus or sulfur compound rising from beneath Jupiter's clouds.

Scientists at Nasa's JPL have been studying data gained from Nasa's Cassini spacecraft, which flew by Jupiter in December 2000 on its way to Saturn and its moons.  They also conducted laboratory experiments  by blasting ammonia and acetylene gases (chemicals known to exist in Jupiter's atmosphere) with ultraviolet light, in order to simulate how the sun affects these chemicals.  The experiment produced a reddish material that matched a model of the Great Red Spot where the red-colored material had been confined to the uppermost reaches of the vortex.

"Our models suggest most of the Great Red Spot is actually pretty bland in color, beneath the upper cloud layer of reddish material," said Kevin Baines, a Cassini team scientist from JPL. "Under the reddish 'sunburn' the clouds are probably whitish or greyish."

Read more in the article on International Business Time site

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Shrinking

Space.com is reporting that Jupiter's great red spot appears to be shrinking!  This observation is based on photos taken by the Hubble space telescope since the early 90s, as well as observations from amateur astronomers.

While the storm has been observations from  the late 1800s estimated  the spot at 25,500 miles across.  A century later, the Voyager spacecraft flybys  in 1979 revealed the spot had shrunk to 14,500 miles.


Images from Hubble showed in images taken in 1995, the storm shrinking to 13,020 miles across. By 2009, the Red Spot had diminished to 11,130 miles.

Read the complete Space.com article HERE

NASA to Europa

Things are looking very good for a NASA mission to Jupiter's very enigmatic icy moon Europa.

IO9 reports that NASA announced:

• $15 million will be allocated for "pre-formulation" work on a mission to Europa, with plans to make detailed observations from orbit and possibly sample its interior oceans with a robotic probe. 
• (Europa has a) massive subsurface ocean contains almost twice as much water as found on Earth. The water is kept in liquid state owing to the gravitational forces exerted by Jupiter and the moon's turbulent global ocean currents.

IO9 article HERE

 

Russia Wants to do a Mission to Ganymede

 

Russia has allocated 1.5 million dollars for the development of a technical proposal to land a probe on the surface of  Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon.

Ganymede would be an excellent choice.  It is the largest moon in the solar system, 8% larger than Mercury but has only 45% of Mercury's  mass.

The Russian mission will be called Laplas-P1, would consist of two spacecraft launched by separate heavy lift  launch vehicles. The trip to Jupiter would take upwards of nine years. 

 In all likelihood a prototype would not be available until 2017, with a launch date of 2023 the arrival could not take place any earlier that 2030.

For more check out the IO9 article HERE

NASA Releases Juno Flyby of Earth Photos of the Earth Moon System.

During October of this year 2013) NASA's  Jupiter bound Juno spacecraft made a close pass of Earth to boost the craft's  speed by almost 9,000 miles-per-hour, captured with it's low-res camera never-before-seen view of the moon orbiting Earth.




Here is the NASA link for the flyby

In short thehe spacecraft, when it arrives in 2018 will be placed in a polar orbit .  There it will study Jupiter's composition, gravity field, magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere.

According to the wiki Juno will also search for clues about how it formed, including whether Jupiter has a rocky core, the amount of water present within the deep atmosphere, and how its mass is distributed.   Wikipedia URL

Mission to Jupiter, launching Aug. 5

Dan reminded me that NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter is due to launch Friday August 5. If you wish to catch the launch the launch window extends from 11:34 a.m. to 12:33 p.m. EDT.

From the article

• The primary goal of the mission is to understand the origin and evolution of the massive gas planet

Juno is due to reach Jupiter in 2016. The trip will cover an astounding 400-million-miles. Once there Juno will orbit the planet 33 times and come within 3,000 miles of the cloud tops.

Maine residents will get a kick out of this. From the article again:

• CU-Boulder senior Dinesh Costlow of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department is collaborating with the Juno science team by using computer models to simulate the trajectory of the spacecraft through all 33 individual orbits. Costlow now a senior at CU-Boulder is from Auburn, Maine.

Read complete article here

Argentine Sat Wants to Know How Salty the Briny Blue Is

Well all kidding aside, Tim Sayell sent in this interesting article from Yahoo News. An Argentine-built satellite was boosted into low Earth orbit atop a Delta 2 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force base shortly before 7:30 PT 6/10/11.

The Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft is a An ocean-mapping satellite who's mission is to chart the saltiness of the sea from space. The information gained from the satellite, according to the article:

• NASA will produce monthly maps detailing changes in salt levels over three years. Scientists hope the data will help them better predict future climate change and short-term climate phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina.
• Besides Aquarius, seven other instruments will collect environmental data including a camera that will make images of volcanic eruptions, wildfires and nighttime light.

Besides Argentina and NASA, other countries participating in the 400 million dollar mission include Brazil, Canada, France and Italy.

This launch marks a first of five that United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of rocket builders Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., will carry out for NASA this year. The other projects will be - according to the article:

• Juno spacecraft to Jupiter, the Grail probe to the moon, the NPP environmental satellite and the Mars Science Laboratory to the Martian surface.

Jupiter to Blame for Mars Being so Small?

It would appear that Jupiter may be to blame for the planet Mars being so low in mass, when in truth it should be somewhere between Venus and Earth in mass. Also the gas giant is most likely responsible for the unusual makeup of the asteroid belt.

Now first is the fact that we have found an inordinate amount of systems that have gas giants very close in to their primary. Instead of it being an aberration, this makeup would appear to be more normal than not.

A research team from Southwest Research Institute ran a series of simulations that demonstrated the effects of Jupiter moving in towards the Sun during the early days of the solar system.

If, shortly after Jupiter formed, was drawn in towards the sun only to reverse the inward spiral at about 1.5 times the distance of Earth's orbit by the formation of Saturn, then most of the planet building material would have been swept up except what existed inside of Earth's orbit. Limiting what was available for Mars.

The question that isn't answered so far is, does this model also explain the asteroid belt?

Dr. Kevin Walsh, leader of the Southwest Research Institute team said: (from the IO9 article)

• "...we started to do a huge number of simulations. The result was fantastic. Our simulations not only showed that the migration of Jupiter was consistent with the existence of the asteroid belt, but also explained properties of the belt never understood before."

The team's conclusions are that not only does their roving Jupiter model explain the lack of mass in Mars but also the existence and weird makeup and distribution of elements.

Nature.com link, IO9 complete article

Galileo spacecraft reveals an ocean of magma

Question: What is the Solar System's most volcanic body? Give up? NASA's Galileo spacecraft has returned data indicating a subsurface ocean of liquid or partially liquid magma on Jupiter's moon Io. This molten layer goes a long way towards explaining why Io is the most volcanic body in the Solar System.

From the NASA article:

• Io produces about 100 times more lava each year than all the volcanoes on Earth. While Earth's volcanoes occur in localized hotspots like the "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific Ocean, Io's volcanoes are distributed all over its surface. A global magma ocean about 20 to 30 miles beneath Io's crust

The NASA article really goes into detail about how Io has been studied and how the volcanic activity was discovered. Its a very informative article.

Jupiter Looses a Belt?!

Tim Sayell was noticing that there was a lot of activity in Yahoo about the planet Jupiter. Looking up what was causing all the furor he came across a really interesting article.

It seems that Jupiter is losing some of it's stripes!

Here is what the article says.

• A giant cloud belt in the southern half of Jupiter has apparently disappeared according to new photos of the planet taken by amateur astronomers.
• The new Jupiter photos, taken May 9 by Australian astronomer Anthony Wesley, reveal that the huge reddish band of clouds that make up the planet's Southern Equatorial Belt has faded from view.

Read complete CSM article here

Could Jupiter's Europa harbor fish-sized life?

According to the latest National Geographic,  the Jovian moon Europa -hundreds of millions of miles from the sun- may host something fishy. Something alive—right now. Below its icy crust Jupiter's moon Europa is believed to host a global ocean up to a hundred miles (160 kilometers) deep...an ocean currently being fed more than a hundred times more oxygen than previous models had suggested, according to provocative new research.

That amount of oxygen would be enough to support more than just microscopic life-forms: At least three million tons of fishlike creatures could theoretically live and breathe on Europa, said study author Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in Tucson. 

""There's nothing saying there is life there now," said Greenberg, who presented his work last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's   Division for Planetary Sciences. "But we do know there are the physical conditions to support it."  Full Article Here.
Photo: NASA/JPL/UArizona/UColorado

Great wide angle shot!

Check this out! Earth AND Jupiter in the same shot! How they do that you might ask? It was snapped by the Mars Global Surveyor on May 22, 2003. And what's more, you have got to log onto the Dvice site here to check out the larger hi-rez version! Amazing photography!

Jupiter ate its early moons

This rather unpleasant view of our jovian neighbor comes from a recent article in New Scientist. Yes, it would appear that the present four moons orbiting Jupiter are the last survivors of at least 5 generations of moons that once circled the gas giant.

At one point there may have been as many as 25 moons orbiting Jupiter and it seems that in the early stages of the formation of the solar system Jupiter devoured 20 or more. The missing moons conjecture comes from estimates of Jupiter's debris cloud during the solar system's formation. This cloud is estimated to have been roughly 30 to 40 percent of the mass of the parent planet. The discrepancy comes from the combined mass of the planets now circling Jupiter which is a paltry 2 percent.

Scientists think that there may have been 5 different sets of moons which spiraled into Jupiter leaving the present 4 which formed when material from the planetary disk stopped flowing into the Jupiter system.

What's even more interesting is that the very same process may have taken place on Saturn.

Sweet vid of Ganymede eclipsed by Jupiter

Here is a sweet video - made from 540 stills taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over a two hour period - They were released just before Christmas, but they were actually shot in April 2007.

Could Jupiter's Gravity End Life on Earth?

Reading in a recent Daily Galaxy article: Scientists are saying that the planet Mercury could possibly smash into our planet. Jacques Laskar of the Paris Observatory and Gregory Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz reached the same unsettling conclusion using separate computer simulations of long-term planetary motion. Leading them both to conclude that the Solar System is not as stable as once thought.

Specifically, both teams found that Jupiter's gravity could eventually make Mercury's orbit so out of round that it overlaps with the path of Venus.

Their models show that Mercury would be forced into one of four unpleasant scenarios if its orbit were disturbed. Either Mercury will 1: crash into the Sun, 2: be ejected from the solar system altogether 3: crash into Venus or worst case Mercury will crash into Earth.

Such an impact would kill all life on our planet. Nothing would survive. By contrast, the asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was likely just 6 miles in diameter; Mercury is 3,032 miles across. The last time an object about that size hit the Earth, the resulting debris formed our Moon.

Even Mars might not be left out of the mix. Most simulations show Mars being pushed into a much colder and farther orbit or ejected as well.

The one saving grace to these scenarios is that the time frame for everything to fall into place in on the order of billions of years, making it more likely that Sol would go well off main sequence and become a red giant before Mercury becomes a problem.

<- more at Sky and Telescope ->

Jupiter has a rocky core and much larger than suspected

Jupiter has a rocky core that is more than twice as large as previously thought, according to computer calculations by a University of California, Berkeley, geophysicist who simulated conditions inside the planet. The simulation predict the properties of hydrogen-helium mixtures at the extreme pressures and temperatures that occur in Jupiter's interior. A comparison of this model with the planet's known mass, radius, surface temperature, gravity and equatorial bulge implies that Jupiter's core is an Earth-like rock 14 to 18 times the mass of Earth, or about one-twentieth of Jupiter's total mass -Previous models predicted a much smaller core of only 7 Earth masses, or no core at all.

UC Berkeley's Burkhard Militzer said about their research: "Our simulations show there is a big rocky object in the center surrounded by an ice layer and hardly any ice elsewhere in the planet," "This is a very different result for the interior structure of Jupiter than other recent models, which predict a relatively small or hardly any core and a mixture of ices throughout the atmosphere."

<- more at ScienceDaily ->

NASA preparing Juno probe to study Jupiter

From Cnet: NASA has announced that it is planning to launch a mission, entitled Juno, to conduct a large-scale survey of our solar system's biggest planet. The spacecraft is planned for an August 2011 launch on board an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It is expected to reach its destination, orbit around Jupiter, in 2016. The plan is for the spacecraft to orbit Jupiter 32 times over the course of a year at a distance of around 3,000 miles above the planet's cloud tops. What makes this mission truly unique is that this would be the first solar-powered spacecraft expected to be able to perform its duties so far from the sun. Jupiter is more than four times farther away from the sun as Earth, a total of around 400 million miles. NASA hopes the mission will discover or explore the existence of an ice-rock core. Plus Juno will also study the planet's strong magnetic field, and its aurora borealis.

Sharpest image of Jupiter ever taken from Earth

Not science fiction but just pure science that make you go wow! Boing Boing reports of an effort to take the highest resolution photo of the planet Jupiter. It was snapped with a telescope using special adaptive optics to reduce fuzz. From National Geographic: [the image was] captured using a new computer-assisted process and a 27-foot (8.2-meter) telescope in Chile, the result is sharp enough to show features as small as 180 miles (300 kilometers) across... ESO comments on how the image was obtained: This false colour photo is the combination of a series of images taken over a time span of about 20 minutes, through three different filters.

Click the link below or the photo of Jupiter to see the full
hi rez photo of Jupiter

Jupiter Grows Third Red Spot

Shaun sends in a fascinating article from Foxnews concerning curious weather manifestations on Jupiter. Its' well known Red Spot has had a smaller companion that was first observed in 2006.
The Little Red Spot, as it was named, shows both size and speed in threatening to knock the former champion off its perch, with Junior's maximum winds reaching 384 mph.

Now Little Red has been joined by a "smaller" companion. What is even more curious is the newer storms are not quite what they seem.

Thermal heat images showed that the Little Red Spot may already match the Great Red Spot for size, although the latter still appears almost twice as large on the surface of Jupiter's atmosphere when examined in visible light. Little Red Spot appears to be part of an interacting system that is actually larger than the Great Red Spot. The Little Red Spot has steadily gained strength even as the Big Red Spot shrinks. Astronomers remain mystified by the angry red color of the storms. The Little Red Spot only changed color in late 2005 after it formed from earlier mergers of three smaller storms. The newest third red spot began as an oval white storm.

Some have speculated that the increase in activity indicates that Jupiter is experiencing a warming trend and the additional energy may be causing more and more violent storms.

Antarctic sub to test waters for Jupiter moon mission

A robotic submarine named Endurance, is set to survey Antarctica's West Lake Bonney in October 2008. Test runs like these are designed to test proof of concept for a version of Endurance to explore the oceans thought to lie beneath the icy crust on Jupiter's moon Europa. Parts to be tested on the sub will be it's ability to operate up to 8 hours unattended which is a must because radio signals take too long to reach the moon for a controller to react in time. Earlier probs to the Jupiter system have reported some very interesting findings. Data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft has revealed hints of carbon – a building block of life – in the moon's purported seas. Both carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide, a potential signal of volcanism, are leaking from discrete areas on the moon's surface. It will be some time before the Endurance mission can take place though. Future preliminary mission need to take place, plus At present, Endurance is too massive to send on interplanetary travel. Scientists must also devise a means to drill through Europa's icy crust and lower the sub safely through the ice. And because radio waves travel poorly through water, a docking station anchored in or around the ice will need to relay data from the submersible to Earth.

(Illustration: Michael Carroll/NASA/JPL

Click the article title or here for complete story