Nasa Picks "juno" As Next New Frontiers Mission |
Nasa Picks "juno" As Next New Frontiers Mission |
Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jun 1 2005, 10:10 PM
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Guests |
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/jun/H...rontiers_2.html
Yeah, I know it ain't Saturn, but we don't seem to have any proper slot for Jovian news -- including yesterday's totally unexpected announcement that Amalthea's density is so low as to suggest that it's a highly porous ice object; maybe a captured Kuiper Belt Object reduced to rubble by infalling meteoroids. As Jason Perry says, this might explain those previously mysterious light-colored patches on Amalthea -- they may be its underlying ice, exposed by impacts that punched through the layer of sulfur spray-painted onto it by Io. Scott Bolton has been pretty talkative to me already about the design of Juno. It certainly won't be as good in the PR department as Galileo or Cassini, but it DOES carry a camera -- as much for PR as for Jovian cloud science, according to Bolton. And since the latitude of periapsis of its highly elliptical orbit will change radically during the primary mission, I wonder if they might be able to set up at least one close photographic flyby of Io and/or Amalthea? (I believe, by the way, that this selection is a bit ahead of schedule -- and it certainly indicates that NASA's science program under Griffin won't be a complete slave to Bush's Moon-Mars initiative.) |
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Guest_Myran_* |
Jun 8 2005, 12:12 PM
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dvandorn wrote:
"I think the most boring thing we could possibly find on Europa would be -- fish. Regular old fish, with scales and gills and DNA and everything. But it would sure hint at some common ancestor to life on both worlds, wouldn't it?" Its true that active swimmers would have to be streamlined to travel efficiently in water, but no or extremely little oxygen would mean no gills and active swimming less likely. (No photosynthesis possible under a mile of ice). If there any life on Europa its more likely to be colonies of organisms gathered around warm springs getting their nourishment from chemical processes, what shape they might have im not qualified to even speculate about. The big question is if liquid water and volcanic heat is enough to get life started. -"- As for sampling and investigating deeper down: The idea of a robot that melts itself down to reach any possible ocean beneath the ice is a clever idea, but its not even on serious consideration so I wont see it in my lifetime. |
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