New Horizons Podcasts, transcript of podcasts at new horizons web site Options

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There are several podcasts up on the New Horizons Podcast page. Here is a transcript of February 15 Podcast #3: "Science Never Sleeps".

John Spencer (Science Team):
Having built a spacecraft to do great science at Pluto, we knew we would be able to do great science at Jupiter as well. So we've had many meetings over the last couple of years where we've distilled our all-encompassing desires for everything we would like to do into some focussed observations which we actually know we can do.

Fran Bagenal (Science Team):
We start off with a very distant view which allows us to look at a bunch of activity remotely.

Andy Cheng (LORRI Lead):
Seeing Jupiter for the first time was amazing, because we didn't even know if we could see Jupiter. And the problem is that the camera -- LORRI -- is designed to image Pluto. Pluto is much farther from the sun, and so it's much dimmer than Jupiter is. So, being able to see it, and to see that the image processing based on the ground calibrations produced a nice image of Jupiter, with even some details we weren't sure that we would see is a surprise that is extremely gratifying.

Alan Stern (Principle Investigator):
Just hit a few of the highlights of the things we'll be looking at in the Jupiter system. Let's start with Jupiter itself. We'll be looking at the region of the great red spot, this famous storm about twice the size of the Earth that's been raging for several hundred years on Jupiter. We can probe this region with our infrared sensor, the Lisa instrument on New Horizons, to look at different cloud levels simultaneously and essentially make a three-dimensional movie of the circulation of this very complex activity. Another storm that we'll be focussing in is the little red spot.

?Andy Cheng:
And it's been changing, so we don't really know what it will look like when we get there, but we're going to take extremely detailed views of what's going on inside.

Alan Stern:
And then we have the four big moons, that we're going to be studying.

John Spencer:
Io is extremely interesting, because it's the most geologically active world in the solar system, so it's unbelievably volcanically active. There are hundreds of active volcanos on its surface all the time. Some of them are shooting gas and dust hundreds of miles into space.

Fran Bagenal:
And the main driver is in fact Io, that pesky little moon with the volcanos that spew out sulfurous gasses. And that sulfur and oxygen becomes ionized and trapped in a giant donut of gas.

John Spencer:
Some of that plasma gets into Jupiter's atmosphere and produces the aurorae on Jupiter that we can study.

Fran Bagenal:
So we'll be looking at the auroral activity, how the northern lights on Jupiter twinkle and change, and at the same time the Hubble Space Telescope will be looking at the aurora from Earth orbit.

Will Grundy:
The three icy Gallilean moons -- icy, in terms having water ice on their surface -- which is Europa, Ganymede, and Calisto, are are really great practice for what we'll see out at Charon in particular, because we know its surface is covered with water ice. They are quite a bit warmer than the surface of Charon, but the chemistry may not be all that different -- laughs -- you know, we'll see.

John Spencer:
We're also very interested in Jupiter's moon Europa, and it has a very exotic surface which we think results from a thin shell of ice over an ocean of liquid water. Where you've got liquid whater, who knows, you might have life, or at least a potential environment for life.

Fran Bagenal:
The most exciting measurement we are going to make at Jupiter in my mind is that we have the first and only time in the history of space that we fly directly down the magnetotail of the Jovian system. So, the magnetosphere of a planet is the sphere of influence of the magnetic field of the planet. Not all planets have dynamos inside that generate a magnetic field, but Jupiter, the Earth, all the giant planets have strong magnetic fields. Now if you take the magnetosphere, and you take the solar wind -- this blast of particles, charged particles, flowing from the sun -- and then you go past the magnetic field of the planet, you pull out the magnetosphere into a long tail,
many, many times longer, so it's like a giant tadpole with a long, long tail behind it. And so, we'll fly past Jupiter and then we down fly directly down the tail. And this is very special because location is key. We have to go there, fly through the system, and make those measurements.

Alan Stern:
One of the ways we helped accomplished a low cost outer planets mission is by having a spacecraft with essentially no moving parts -- no scan platforms, for example. So all of the instruments along with the high gain antenna are body mounted -- they are fixed. This means you have to make a choice between pointing the instruments to take science and pointing the antenna to talk back to the Earth. So our philosophy is we take data first and we spool it back later.

John Spencer:
I think even if all we get from the spacecraft -- which we will get during closest approach period -- is, hey, you know, "IoSunMon05 executed correctly", you know, all these different observations we're doing -- just to know everything happened the way we planned it is just going to be a real thrill, and I'm really looking forward to that.

Alan Stern:
After closest approach, beginning in March, we'll send all that data back at a characteristic data rate of about 40 kilobits per second.

Dwayne Brown (Public Affairs):
2007 is shaping up to be a great year of science activities, picking up where '06 left off. Science never sleeps. Thanks for joining us.