Today NASA released stunning new images of Jupiter and its moons taken by the New Horizons spacecraft. Views include a movie of a volcanic eruption on Jupiter’s moon Io; a nighttime shot of auroras and lava on Io; a color photo of the “Little Red Spot” churning in Jupiter’s cloudtops; images of small moons herding dust and boulders through Jupiter’s faint rings–and much more: gallery.
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“We’ll be analyzing these data for months to come,” says Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator and New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of NASA Headquarters. “We have collected spectacular scientific products as well as evocative images.”
New Horizons came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on Feb. 28 in a gravity assist maneuver designed to trim three years off its travel time to Pluto. For several weeks before and after this closest approach, the piano-sized robotic probe trained its seven cameras and sensors on Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700 observations on its digital recorders and gradually sending that information back to Earth. About 70 percent of the expected 34 gigabits of data has come back so far, radioed to NASA’s largest antennas over more than 600 million miles.
This activity confirmed the successful testing of the instruments and operating software the spacecraft will use at Pluto. “Aside from setting up our 2015 arrival at Pluto, the Jupiter flyby was a stress test of our spacecraft and team, and both passed with very high marks,” adds Stern.
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A highlight of the flyby was the first close-up color scan of the Little Red Spot:
This storm is about half the size of Jupiter’s larger Great Red Spot and about 70 percent of Earth’s diameter. It formed in the late 1990s when three smaller storms collided and merged. The combined storm started out white, but began turning red about a year ago. Using New Horizons data, scientists will be able to search for clues about how these great storm systems form and why they change colors.
“This is our best look ever at a storm like this in its infancy,” said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md. APL built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft.
Under a range of lighting and viewing angles, New Horizons also grabbed the clearest images ever of the tenuous Jovian ring system. In them, scientists spotted a series of unexpected arcs and clumps of dust, indicative of a recent impact into the ring by a small object.
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Movies made from New Horizons images also provide an unprecedented look at ring dynamics, with the tiny inner moons Metis and Adrastea appearing to shepherd the materials around the rings. (Scroll to the middle of this page to see the movies.)
“We’re starting to see that rings can evolve rapidly, with changes detectable during weeks and months,” said Jeff Moore, New Horizons Jupiter Encounter science team lead from NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “We’ve seen similar phenomena in the rings of Saturn.”
Of Jupiter’s four largest moons, the team focused much attention on volcanic Io, the most geologically active body in the solar system. New Horizons’ cameras captured pockets of bright, glowing lava scattered across the surface; dozens of small, glowing spots of gas; and several fortuitous views of a sunlit umbrella-shaped dust plume rising 200 miles into space from the volcano Tvashtar, the best images yet of a giant eruption from the tortured volcanic moon.
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The timing and location of the spacecraft’s trajectory also allowed it to spy many of the mysterious, circular troughs carved onto the icy moon Europa. Data on the size, depth and distribution of these troughs, discovered by the Jupiter-orbiting Galileo mission, will help scientists determine the thickness of the ice shell that covers Europa’s global ocean.
Already the fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons reached Jupiter 13 months after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., in January 2006. The flyby added 9,000 miles per hour, pushing the velocity of New Horizons past 50,000 miles per hour and setting up a flight by Pluto in July 2015.
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The number of observations at Jupiter was actually twice that of those planned at Pluto. New Horizons made most of these observations during the spacecraft’s closest approach to the planet, which was guided by more than 40,000 separate commands in the onboard computer.
“We can run simulations and take test images of stars, and learn that things would probably work fine at Pluto,” said John Spencer, deputy lead of the New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Science Team, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. “But having a planet to look at and lots of data to dig into tells us that the spacecraft and team can do all these amazing things. We might not have explored the full capabilities of the spacecraft if we didn’t have this real planetary flyby to push the system and get our imaginations going.”
There’s more to come: New Horizons is making an unprecedented flight down Jupiter’s long magnetotail, where it will analyze the intensities of sun-charged particles that flow hundreds of millions of miles beyond the giant planet. Stay tuned!
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New Horizons Videos:
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Filed under: Jupiter • Space Missions
Callisto could also maintain large telescopes to study Jupiter and its moons and also the rest of the universe. Mass shielding from cosmic radiation and micrometeorites using the ice crust shouldn't be too difficult. Water and oxygen can also be derived from the regolith. Hopefully, living on a low gravity world with a a 0.13 gravity won't be too deleterious to the health of the humans living there. But, in the near future, a lunar facility, with its 0.16 gravity, should tell us if it is seriously harmful for humans to live in a low gravity environment.
What I most worry about are things that come flying into the solar system from outside the ecliptic. These would be comets, planets, possibly brown dwarfs, that are kicked out of other star systems are are just flying through space. It would suck for something the size of jupiter to come zooming through our solar system from above or below.
“Hey, wait … that's no comet!”
This is why I want to be a planetary scientist. Stars are cool, well hot, but there are only so many types of stars. Galaxies are so massive that it’s just too difficult to make out the details in one lifetime. But planets and moons, we’re in the process of discovering some of the most bizarre, outrageous examples of nature that no one has ever imagined. Planets and moons come in so many different forms that I believe it’s almost impossible to try and catalog them, they’re just too unique. The hazy, methane rich atmosphere of Titan, the swirling, Earth-sized storms on Jupiter, the absolutely beautiful rings of Saturn, the bizarro colors on Io and the battle scared Callisto; they’re all just so amazing! Even in our own solar system we haven’t truly seen what exists, which is why I’m so excited for the arrival of the New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto in 2015. I think I could spend an eternity just looking for new styles of planets and moons.
I noticed that Google Earth also provides us with options to observe the sky (with the constellations of stars), the Moon and Mars. I wonder how they manage to set up the infrastructure which can map locations and objects which are so far away. At this rate, Google might even provide images of Jupiter, Saturn, the rest of the planets, the Asteroid belt and other celestial bodies. It would be really extraordinary if “Google Sun” came into being. In fact, sometime in the future, Google Earth might get renamed to Google Universe.
>>when did people really get to see what Jupiter looks like?<<
The telescope was invented in the 1500s, and Jupiter has been observed pretty much every day since then by professionals and amateurs alike.
>>and how do we know for sure that NASA hasnt created these images…such as how they do with "computer animation"..and Jupiter really looks like it is shown in pictures from NASA?<<
You can look at Jupiter yourself with a modest telescope.
>>before 1950…did most people not know what "Jupiter" looked like really?<<
Pictures of Jupiter taken through telescopes have been around practically since photography was invented. Most people knew a lot about what it looked like, albeit in less detail than probes could provide.
>>why they cant show satellite images of Jupiter for an extended length of time? say for 3 minutes? are most just photographs ? why cant they take videos of it?<<
What would be the point? In a few minutes, nothing much changes on Jupiter. It takes 10 hours to rotate once on its axis. That means if you wanted to see any particular feature on it (say the great red spot) move across its disc, it would take five whole hours. Video of things in space is worthless. They just don't move fast enough to be worthwhile capturing on video. High resolution images are much more useful.