JUPITER STORMS

Big Red and the hot spot Storms

5-28-08

5-30-08

A third red spot has appeared alongside the Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr. in the turbulent Jovian atmosphere.
I left the photo large to enable easy reading.

Jupiter Grows Third Red Spot

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

A potentially historic change is occurring on Jupiter. An upstart storm now rivals the gas giant's Big Red Spot as king of storms, astronomers announced last week.

The Little Red Spot, as it was named upon discovery in 2006, shows both size and speed in threatening to knock the former champion off its perch, with Junior's maximum winds reaching 384 mph (172 meters per second).

"In terms of maximum wind speed, the Little Red Spot as measured in 2007 and the Great Red Spot when last measured in 2000 are just about
the same," said Andrew Cheng, physicist and lead study author at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Those winds far outstrip the 156 mph threshold that defines a Category 5 hurricane on Earth, and the Little Red Spot itself appears nearly as
 big as our whole planet.

Seeing spots

A third red spot on Jupiter was also announced last week by a different team, joining its larger super-storm cousins. The Great Red Spot
has raged on for at least two centuries and perhaps as much as 350 years, ancient observations suggest.

Cheng's team used image maps made by the New Horizons spacecraft to gauge wind speed and direction.

The Hubble Space Telescope provided visible-light images of the storms, while the Very Large Telescope in Chile used mid-infrared to glimpse
the thermal structure of the storms below the visible cloud tops.

The 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.

"In the infrared, which sees deeper beneath those clouds, the Little Red Spot appears to be part of an interacting system that is actually larger than the Great Red Spot," Cheng told SPACE.com.

The Little Red Spot has steadily gained strength even as the Big Red Spot shrinks.

Both storms have winds that circulate in the opposite direction to that of a cyclone, or counterclockwise, and appear "strikingly similar," Cheng
said.

Seeing red

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.

Similarly, the newest third red spot began as an oval white storm.

These latest findings support the theory that the most powerful storms dredge up material from below Jupiter's clouds and lift it into the upper atmosphere. That exposes the material to solar ultraviolet radiation and causes the color change to red.

The newcomer storm may end up merging with the Great Red Spot or getting pushed away when the two encounter each other in August,
assuming their paths remain the same. The Little Red Spot lies at a lower latitude and will pass the Great Red Spot in June.

Such changes in Jupiter's weather come as part of a global upheaval that began before the New Horizons spacecraft visited last year.

The idea that Jupiter is undergoing global climate change was proposed in 2004 by Phil Marcus, a mechanical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley.

He predicted large changes in the southern hemisphere starting around 2006 that would destabilize jet streams and spawn new storms.

Much of the activity in the gas giant's South Equatorial Belt has disappeared and left the Great Red Spot isolated, foreshadowing even greater changes to come.

"The Great Red Spot may not always be the largest and strongest storm on Jupiter," said Glenn Orton, planetary scientist and study coauthor
at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Copyright © 2008 Imaginova Corp. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

Manuel Mitternacht
May 25, 2008

Climate change ... the emergence of a second and third red spot on Jupiter suggest it's getting hot on the fifth planet. Hubble telescope
Photo: Hubble Telescope

JUPITER, the biggest planet of the solar system, famous for its big red spot and a newer second spot is growing a third.

The Great Red Spot is a gas storm, three times the size of the planet Earth, that has raged for almost 350 years.

A second spot appeared in 2006 on the turbulent surface of the gas giant and could result from a temperature increase of up to 10 degrees in
the equatorial region of the planet.

New images from the space-based Hubble telescope, made public yesterday, reveal a new addition to Jupiter's storm-ravaged surface.

A smaller storm, about half the size of Earth, has developed next to its giant neighbour and is estimated to collide with the big red spot in August. Astronomers expect a spectacular reaction when the two ferocious storms, spinning with wind speeds of up to 620 kilometres an hour, meet.

University of California Berkeley scientist Michael Wong is looking forward to the encounter 750 million kilometres from Earth.

"The small oval will either be absorbed or repelled from the Great Red Spot," he said.

While turbulent storms on Jupiter are common, astronomers are puzzled about the nature of their red colour.

A possible explanation is that only the powerful storms dredge materials from deep below the clouds to higher altitudes where ultraviolet
radiation produces the dark red colour.

Source: The Sun-Herald
 

Jupiter storm 'could become solar system's largest'

Thursday, 22 May 2008 13:52
The Little Red Spot covers an area roughly the size of Earth and features winds of up to 384mph
 Jupiter is close to becoming the solar system's largest after scientists observed its size and wind speeds increasing.

High resolution images of the Little Red Spot (LRS) have been combined with powerful Earth-orbital and ground-based imagery for the first time.

The LRS is one of the largest and newest storms known to astronomers, with its age being dwarfed by its Jupiter neighbour the Great Red Spot (GRS), which has raged for more than three centuries.

But as the GRS shrinks in terms of velocity and stature its smaller counterpart is showing signs of overtaking.

Scientists say they have gained a greater understanding of LRS' future after combining data from Nasa's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft,
the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

The anticyclone covers an area roughly the size of Earth and features winds of up to 384mph, more than double a category five storm.

Dr Andrew Cheng of the John Hopkins University applied physics laboratory commented that the rapid changes observed at LRS remained one
 of the solar system's mysteries.

"This unique set of observations is giving us hints about the storm's structure and makeup; from this, we expect to learn much more about how
these large atmospheric disturbances form on worlds across the solar system," he explained.


 Jupiter Breaks Out in Spots
By Space.com Staff

posted: 23 May 2008
12:37 pm ET

 A third red spot has appeared on Jupiter in what astronomers called a case of the planetary measles.

Astronomers spotted the new storm — a distant smaller cousin of the Great Red Spot and Little Red Spot — using the Hubble Space Telescope and
W.M. Keck telescope to get both visible-light and near-infrared images.

Turbulent storms are common in Jupiter's atmosphere, although the red color in the biggest storms remains a mystery. The new red spot, announced yesterday, was previously a white, oval-shaped storm.

One theory suggests such storms have enough power and size to dredge material from deep beneath Jupiter's clouds and lift it to higher altitudes, exposing it to solar ultraviolet radiation that changes the color to the now-familiar red.

Early telescope observations indicate that the Great Red Spot has lasted somewhere between 200 and 350 years, while the Little Red Spot appeared
in spring 2006. The third red spot was spotted in Hubble and Keck images taken between May 9 and May 11 of this year.

The newest storm may end up merging with the Great Red Spot when the two meet in August, assuming they continue on their current paths,
astronomers said. Otherwise the Great Red Spot may simply shove its smaller cousin aside.

The latest Hubble and Keck images also support the idea of Jupiter undergoing global climate change. Warming near the giant planet's equator
and cooling at the South Pole could be destabilizing the southern hemisphere, causing jet streams to go haywire and spawn new storms.

 

New Storm on Jupiter Hints at Climate Change
By Sara Goudarzi
Staff Writer
posted: 04 May 2006
01:00 pm ET

A storm is brewing half a billion miles away and in a rare event, astronomers get to watch it closely.

Jupiter is growing a new red spot and the Hubble Space Telescope is photographing the scene. Backyard astronomers have been following the action,
too.

"Red Spot Jr." as it is being called, formed after three white oval-shaped storms-two of which were at least 90 years old-merged between 1998 and 2000.

A similar merger took place centuries ago and formed the bigger and legendary Great Red Spot, a storm twice as big as Earth and almost 300 years old.

Close look

Close inspections of Red Spot Jr., in Hubble images released today, reveal that similar to the Great Red Spot, the more recently developed storm rises above the top of the main cloud deck on Jupiter.

Little is known about how storms form on the giant planet. They are often described as behaving similar to hurricanes on Earth. Some astronomers
believe that the spots dredge up material deep below Jupiter's clouds and lift it to where the Sun's ultraviolet light chemically alters it to give it a
red hue.

The latest images could provide evidence that Jupiter is in the midst of a global change that can modify temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit on different parts of the globe.

The study was led jointly by Imke de Pater and Philip Marcus of University of California, Berkeley.

"The storm is growing in altitude," de Pater said. "Before when they were just ovals they didn't stick out above the clouds. Now they are rising."

This growth signals a temperature increase in that region, she said.

Marking change

The global change cycle began when the last of the white oval-shaped storms formed south of the Great Red Spot in 1939. As the storms started to
merge between 1998 and 2000, the mixing of heat began to slow down at that latitude and has continued slowing ever since. 

The movement of heat from the equator to Jupiter's south pole is expected to stop at 34 degrees southern latitude, where Red Spot Jr. is forming.

This will create a big wall and stop the mixing of heat and airflow, the thinking goes. As a result, areas around the equator become warmer, while
the poles can start to cool down.


Will Galileo Make Jupiter a Star?

September 14, 2003

Update (November 14, 2003): It turns out that I made an error in one of my arguments on the original version of this page. It doesn't affect the end
result (that Galileo cannot blow up like a bomb), but I want to make sure I am honest here. I don't want this to get in the way of the main point, so
 I am putting the explanation of my error at the bottom of this page. This page now reflects the current arguments. Here is the old, incorrect page.

 In October of 1989, NASA launched the Galileo spacecraft toward the planet Jupiter. Its mission was manyfold: to explore the moons of the giant
planet, to investigate the environment of Jupiter's neighborhood, and to drop a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere to measure its physical characteristics.

After nearly eight years, Galileo's mission is over. It is out of fuel, and has been hammered by Jupiter's radioactive magnetic field for so long that
its hardware is dying. NASA decided that the best thing to do is use the remaining fuel to drop the spacecraft into Jupiter, where it will burn up
harmlessly. They feel this is better than letting it continue to orbit the planet, because it might eventually crash into one of the moons. One such
moon, Europa, may just possibly have the right conditions for life to evolve, and they don't want Galileo to contaminate the moon, even given the extremely long odds of it happening. Galileo will plunge into Jupiter on September 21, 2003, around 20:00 hours Greenwich time.

But some people think that NASA had more plans for Galileo. They claim that NASA's nefarious scheme was to drop Galileo into Jupiter and use
it to ignite Jupiter like a fusion bomb, either turning it into a star like the Sun, or simply blowing it to smithereens. J.C. Goliathan, one of the main proponents of this "Jupiter ignition" idea, has a long page about all this.

Can this be true? Could NASA accomplish such a dastardly plot?

As always, the short answer to this is to look at the title bar of your browser and read the name of this website. To save you time, I'll just say it here:
no, Galileo will not do anything to Jupiter. Like a meteor, it'll burn up in the dense atmosphere, and become a part of the solar system's largest planet.

Yet the idea that Jupiter may explode is spreading across the web, sticking in this case (unlike the Moon Hoax or Planet X) mostly to the woowoo sites.
So what are the main ideas behind it, and why are they wrong?

There are several ideas put forth, and they are wrong for lots of reasons. They sound legitimate, as many pseudoscientific ideas do, but that's different
than actually being right. Let's take a look.

Here are the claims made by the alarmists:

  1. Galileo has plutonium onboard. This is what makes fission bombs! NASA plans on creating a fission bomb using Galileo.

     

  2. Fusion bombs are made by using fission bombs as triggers. The implosion caused by a fission bomb ignites hydrogen into fusion, generating a
    much bigger blast. Jupiter is made of mostly hydrogen! So it can be blown up like an H-bomb.

     

  3. Stars work by fusing hydrogen. Jupiter might turn into a star, or it might simply blow up like a bomb.

Got all that? OK, point-by-point, let's see why it's all wrong.


1) Galileo has plutonium onboard. This is what makes fission bombs! NASA plans on creating a fission bomb using Galileo.

Galileo does indeed have plutonium (Pu) onboard. The instruments onboard need power, and Jupiter is too far from the Sun to use solar power very
well. The solar panels would need to be very large, too large and heavy to get to Jupiter.

Instead, Galileo uses a tried-and-true technology: radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). Basically, these are extremely simple devices: inside
an RTG is a pellet of radioactive material. As the material decays, it generates heat. The heat is converted to electricity, which powers the spacecraft.

Galileo's RTGs use plutonium in the form of ceramic pellets of plutonium dioxide. There is about 50 pounds of Pu onboard, stored in 144 separate cylindrical pellets. There are two RTGs on Galileo, each with 72 pellets (a paper about RTGs with a diagram can be found at NASA's Space Science website). Note: I am not going to get into a discussion over whether RTGs are safe, and the dangers or lack thereof posed by launching radioactive materials into space. Please read Spaceviews' page on RTGs for more info, and their list of pro and anti RTG sites as well.


 Fission bombs work in this (simplified) way. The nucleus of a plutonium atom naturally splits into two or more pieces when a neutron (a subatomic particle) hits it. When it splits (also called fissioning), it releases energy and more neutrons. These hit other nuclei, causing them to split, etc. If the
atoms are too far apart, then this effect won't work, because, basically, the neutrons miss the other nuclei. But if the atoms are packed tightly enough,
you get a runaway reaction. More and more split, the energy released gets very big, and boom! Atomic bomb.

The amount of mass you need packed together to get a runaway chain reaction is called the critical mass. For plutonium 238, the kind that was on
Galileo, you need about 10 or so kilograms (22 pounds) all packed tightly into a ball. Galileo had more than that amount on board, but (and this is a
huge but) it was spread out in smaller pieces. The RTGs extend along a long boom, a rod that extends out from the main body of the spacecraft, and
not in a way that works as a fission bomb. There are 72 separate chambers where the Pu238 was stored, and each piece had a sub-critical mass. You would have to compress those pieces together to make them critical and cause a fission reaction.

But that could not happen. Why not? Because Galileo entered Jupiter at a speed of about 100,000 miles per hour. At that speed, the pressure would
tear the spacecraft apart. It slows as it passes through denser atmosphere, of course, but the pressures would be so high at those velocities that
Galileo would be shredded. As the pieces fall off, they are heated due to compressing the air in front of them. This is why meteors get hot, in fact,
and at these speeds the metal on Galileo would melt in short order. This would release the plutonium, dispersing it.

So instead of compressing it, as the pseudoscientists claim, the plutonium would actually get strewn through Jupiter, making it literally impossible
to explode. So step one -- Galileo becoming a fission bomb -- cannot happen.

Not that this stops the pseudoscientists, of course. The doomcriers at YOWUSA make a big deal of how Pu is used in a bomb, and even show the
geometry of a fission-induced fusion bomb (Note added November, 2003: YOWUSA has made their archives available only to subscribers, so the
image is no longer available). But that's not how the RTGs are constructed! Posting that image is grossly misleading. The RTGs are not in anything
like the geometry of a fission bomb. This is more obfuscation on the part of the doomsayers. Also, the YOWUSA folks, when quoting Goliathan,
appear to think that somehow the pressure from the passage of Galileo through Jupiter's atmosphere will compress the plutonium enough to start
a chain reaction, which will then trigger fusion. But the fission has to happen with precise timing, and in a certain geometry. How do they propose
that will happen, exactly, with Galileo tumbling down into Jupiter, parts of it flying off due to the heat and pressure of supersonic atmospheric entry?
They somehow conveniently left that part off of their description.

Conclusion: The plutonium on Galileo cannot fission to become a bomb.

 


2) Fusion bombs are made by using fission bombs as triggers. The implosion caused by a fission bomb ignites hydrogen into fusion, generating a much bigger blast.

A hydrogen bomb explodes because atomic nuclei of hydrogen are squeezed together. If squeezed hard enough, the atomic nuclei fuse (stick together), and that releases energy. You have to apply a lot of pressure and heat to get the hydrogen to do this, and one way to do that is to use the blast wave
from a fission bomb.

Basically, a fission bomb is used to trigger a process which creates the hydrogen fuel for the fusion reaction (more on this in a moment). The shock
wave and heat from the fission explosion must work in a very specific way to do this. When it works, the fusion releases far more energy than a
fission explosion, which is why H-bombs have so much more explosive yield than A-bombs.

And hey, isn't Jupiter mostly hydrogen? Yikes, a fission explosion can make Jupiter explode like a bomb!

No, it can't, and for two reasons. Well, three if you include the fact that Galileo couldn't make a fission bomb, as noted above. But even if it could, it wouldn't make Jupiter detonate, because the RTGs aren't configured to be used as a fission trigger, and because Jupiter doesn't have the right stuff
in it to fuse.

While Jupiter is mostly hydrogen, it's the wrong kind. Remember isotopes; atoms with different number of neutrons? Hydrogen has them too. A
hydrogen nucleus at its simplest is just a lone proton. Deuterium (D2) is hydrogen with a neutron and a proton, and tritium (T3) is a proton with two neutrons. Fusion bombs need the neutron-added isotopes. Regular old hydrogen won't do it. Simply taking a sample of hydrogen gas and compressing
it won't make it fuse; you need a fuel enriched with D2 and T3. Finding these materials isn't all that easy, and a randomly selected pocket of Jupiter's
gas is unlikely in the extreme to have them in sufficient quantities to explode.

What's worse, the way we make bombs these days, you need lithium to make them work, and that's not terribly common in Jupiter either. Here's how
a fusion bomb works. You need a fission explosion to start with, which is used to do two things: it generates X-rays, which heat and compress the fusion fuel, and it actually helps create the fuel. As I have discovered while researching this article, the process is somewhat complicated. In a very brief
nutshell, the fission explosion is used to irradiate lithium. Neutrons from the fission explosion combine with the lithium to create tritium. The heat
and pressure from the X-rays compress the tritium, and bang!

Again, this sequence of events is highly unlikely to occur on Jupiter. You need lots of lithium, which is not terribly abundant. You need it to make
tritium, which is highly unstable (it doesn't last long once created) and again unlikely in the extreme to be found in Jupiter's atmosphere. It's really
just plain old silly to think this could happen with Galileo, even if it had the right kind of fission material. Which it doesn't.

This doesn't stop Goliathan from speculating wildly, though. He says:

However, conventional belief says that Deuterium and Tritium (isotopes of Hydrogen) are necessary to accomplish fusion. Both may be present or created during a reaction within the dense liquid hydrogen of Jupiter.

Again, he doesn't state how this might happen. I am not an expert on such things, and won't speculate, but it seems unlikely that Jupiter can create
these elements, given that it takes nuclear reactions to do it (specifically, a proton has to absorb an electron and an anti-neutrino to become a
neutron). Jupiter isn't big enough to do it.

Even if you supplied a fission bomb, you won't get hydrogen (tritium) to fuse. And Galileo doesn't have what it takes to make a fission explosion.

FROM:


3) Stars work by fusing hydrogen. Jupiter might turn into a star, or it might simply blow up like a bomb.

OK, so we don't have fission, and we don't have fusion. So let's suppose, contrary to all evidence, that NASA is really lying to us, and has put fission
bombs and fusion fuel aboard Galileo. When they go off, will Jupiter explode, or turn into a star?

Nope, and nope. Fusion is not a runaway process. Once you start it up, it generates a lot of heat, which tends to expand the material violently (this is
what we technically call a bomb). This means the fuel gets scattered, and it won't fuse. Making really big hydrogen bombs run into this problem,
making it hard to make really big bombs, which in my book is perhaps a good thing.

So the process tends to damp itself off. Jupiter won't explode. It won't turn into a star, either. Stars work by maintaining fusion in their cores. Now,
I just said fusion isn't self-sustaining, so how do stars keep it going? They do it by containing the hydrogen in a small volume. This is accomplished
by piling a lot of mass on top of the hydrogen: the mass of the star.

The star has enough gravity that all that mass squeezes and heats the core enough for fusion to not only take place, but to continue at a relatively
stable pace. But it turns out there is a lower limit to that mass; if you don't have enough, then you don't get the high temperatures and pressures
necessary to ignite fusion. That mass is about 0.077 times the mass of the Sun, or 80 times Jupiter's mass. In other words, Jupiter is 1/80th the mass
it needs to turn into a star. Some people call Jupiter a failed star, but in reality it ain't even close.

Conclusion: Jupiter won't explode, or turn into a star, because it lacks the containment to keep fusion going.

There's more, of course. Goliathan, in his article, makes lots of statements as if they are facts, but are actually wrong. For example, it might be
relevant to ask why NASA doesn't simply boost Galileo out of the Jupiter system and into space, rather than smack it into Jupiter. Goliathan takes
that farther:

Some argue that the craft is caught in Jupiter's pull now, but with all of the gravity assist tricks available, and still some propellant left, the craft should be able to break free even if they had to use an assist of one of the larger moons.

Here he shows a profound ignorance of the situation. Jupiter's gravity is immense. Escape velocity is quite high, nearly 6 times (*) that of Earth's! If
Galileo had enough fuel to escape from Jupiter, then we wouldn't have needed to use gravity assists from Venus and twice with Earth. As an example,
 the propellant used to get to Jupiter needed to change Galileo's velocity by about 15 kilometers/second (the difference between the Earth's orbital
speed and Jupiter's). The rocket could not provide that on its own, so we needed help from the gravity of Venus and Earth. But, to escape Jupiter
from, say, the distance of Europa, Galileo needs to add 6 km/s to its velocity, a healthy chunk of what it needed to get to Jupiter in the first place.
Closer in to Jupiter the situation is even worse. Up until about 2001, there was enough fuel on board Galileo to have it get into an escape trajectory,
but after that there was too little fuel left.

If I have time I will add to this article over the next few days, but I think I've made it pretty clear that this idea that Galileo will somehow cause a
nuclear explosion on Jupiter is wrong. Remember, if you hear something on the web about how some astronomical event may cause doomsday
here on Earth, read it with a very skeptical eye. And check Bad Astronomy before you start putting your affairs in order!

 

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Contact: Guy Webster, (818) 354-6278

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 30, 2000

CASSINI VISUALIZES THE INVISIBLE, TRACKS GIANT STORMS

       NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which made its closest approach to Jupiter early today, is providing ways to make invisible features visible, to track daily changes in some of the planet's most visible storms, and to hear the patterns in natural radio emissions near the edge of Jupiter's magnetic environment.

       In collaboration with NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which has been orbiting Jupiter since 1995, Cassini is also beginning to provide new insight in how the solar wind of particles speeding away from the Sun affects a huge magnetic region surrounding Jupiter.

       Scientists using instruments on both Cassini and Galileo gave a preview today at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., of what they are beginning to learn in the joint studies, which will continue for another three months.

       Large storms on Jupiter, which can be larger than Earth and last for centuries, gain energy from swallowing smaller storms, preliminary analysis of Jupiter movies from Cassini spacecraft suggest. The smaller storms pull their energy from lower depths, according to information collected by Galileo.

       The Cassini spacecraft, which made its closest approach to Jupiter today at 2:12 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, has taken pictures of thunderstorms on Jupiter. As small storms pass each other, they can be ripped apart, or merged together. This shows that the small features in Jupiter's atmosphere harvest the energy from below the cloud surface, and the larger storms encompass the small ones, just as a big fish eats smaller ones for energy, said Dr. Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology.

       He said a better understanding of storms on Jupiter helps in understanding Earth's atmosphere, too. "The weather is different on Jupiter. You have a 300-year-old storm. We'd like to know why Jupiter's weather is so stable, and Earth's is so transient," he said.

       Dr. Carolyn Porco of the University of Arizona presented planet-wide movies of cloud movements on Jupiter, a sampling of the Cassini camera results that scientists will be examining in coming months.

       "The camera has performed beyond our wildest imaginings - - and that's saying something, because we've been imagining this for a decade now," she said.

       Both Cassini and Galileo have recently returned evidence of the variability in size of Jupiter's magnetosphere, a bubble of charged particles trapped within Jupiter's magnetic field. The bubble is so big that if it were visible to the eye, it would appear bigger to viewers on Earth than our own Moon does, despite its much greater distance. While Galileo was moving toward Jupiter this fall, it passed the magnetosphere boundary, but then the boundary moved inward toward Jupiter even faster than the spacecraft was moving, temporarily putting Galileo back outside the magnetosphere, said Dr. William Kurth of the University of Iowa.

       Kurth played a sound recording based on natural radio emissions created by the energy of the area where the solar wind hits Jupiter's magnetosphere. The emissions were detected on an instrument onboard Cassini, which encountered the boundary this week much farther out from Jupiter than expected.

       Another instrument on Cassini is creating images never before possible of the entire magnetosphere. Dr. Stamatios (Tom) Krimigis of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory presented one at the briefing that Cassini took this week, showing some features of the structure within the magnetosphere. Other Cassini measurements show that some sulfur and oxygen spewed from volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io are distributed much farther from the planet than the extent of the magnetosphere, Krimigis said.

       The evidence shows there is big nebula of material surrounding Jupiter, originating from the volcanoes on Io, he said.

       Cassini passed about 9.7 million kilometers (6 million miles) from Jupiter today in order to use Jupiter's gravity for a boost to take Cassini to its main destination, Saturn. It will reach Saturn in 2004.

       The images and sounds released at the briefing are available online from JPL at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov .

       Cassini is a cooperative effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages Galileo and Cassini for the NASA Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

 
#####
12-30-00 GW
#2000-134

FROM: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2000/track.html

 

Science 2 February 1996:
Vol. 271. no. 5249, p. 593
DOI: 10.1126/science.271.5249.593

Richard A. Kerr

Planetary scientists hoped that the free-flying probe released into Jupiter's atmosphere by the spacecraft Galileo would return results they could use to help understand the formation of the gas giant and of the whole solar system. But thanks to a piece of bad luck, the probe came down in an uncharacteristically hot, dry, and cloudless spot--essentially a Jovian Sahara--dashing
those hopes at least for now. Still, the data are offering new insights into Jupiter's weather, possibly helping resolve a debate about the origins of the planet's strong winds.


 

 

On 1994 July 16-22, over twenty fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with the planet Jupiter. The comet, discovered the previous year by astronomers Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy, was observed by astronomers at hundreds of observatories around the world as it crashed into Jupiter's southern hemisphere. This Web site is here to provide some of the images taken by amateur and professional astronomers before, during, and after the events, and to provide more information on this historic event.

STRING OF PEARLS COMETS

Calculations shortly after the discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in March 1993 showed that the comet was in orbit about Jupiter and would collide with the planet...
www.greatdreams.com/lostland/string-pearls.htm

 

JUPITER DATABASE ON THIS SITE

JUPITER'S MOON CALISTO

JUPITER'S MOONS IO AND EUROPA


Impact Images
Spectacular images of Jupiter during and after the impacts
Other Images
Comet and and Jupiter images, and computer simulations, from before the impacts
Information
Before-and-after perspectives on the impact
Web Sites
Visit some other Web sites
Back to SEDS
Return to the SEDS home page

 

 

PLANET DATABASE

CONSTELLATION DATABASE

SUN DATABASE

DREAMS OF THE GREAT EARTHCHANGES - MAIN INDEX