Image (Credit): NASA’s Europa Clipper poster. (NASA/ Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech)
“Engineers with NASA’s Europa Clipper mission continue to conduct extensive testing of transistors that help control the flow of electricity on the spacecraft. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission, began the tests after learning that some of these parts may not withstand the radiation of the Jupiter system, which is the most intense radiation environment in the solar system.”
–NASA statement from yesterday regarding potential issues with electrical switches on the Europa Clipper spacecraft that is set to launch in October. Whether this leads to a delayed launch of the mission or a less nimble mission has yet to be determined. The preliminary findings from the current testing are expected to be released later this month.
SpaceX successfully launched its first Falcon Heavy of the year on Wednesday evening, the triple-barreled booster lifting the 11,000-pound (5,000-kilogram) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-U) almost to Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Heavy—flying for the first time since November 2022 with a brand-new center core and pair of side-mounted strap-on boosters—went airborne from historic Pad 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) at 5:26 p.m. EDT, ten minutes after the opening of a two-hour “launch window”.
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter was observed by Webb’s Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) in July 2022, using the instrument’s Integral Field Unit capabilities. The team’s Early Release Science observations sought to investigate if this region was in fact dull, and the region above the iconic Great Red Spot was targeted for Webb’s observations. The team was surprised to discover that the upper atmosphere hosts a variety of intricate structures, including dark arcs and bright spots, across the entire field of view. “We thought this region, perhaps naively, would be really boring,” shared team leader Henrik Melin of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. “It is in fact just as interesting as the northern lights, if not more so. Jupiter never ceases to surprise.”
Gravitational wave detectors, LIGO and Virgo, have detected a population of massive black holes whose origin is one of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy. According to one hypothesis, these objects may have formed in the very early Universe and may compose dark matter, a mysterious substance filling the Universe. A team of scientists from the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) survey from the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw have announced the results of nearly 20-year-long observations indicating that such massive black holes may comprise at most a few percent of dark matter. Another explanation, therefore, is needed for gravitational wave sources. The results of the study were published in two articles, in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
Image (Credit): Stairwell of the Braude observatory’s main building with a painting of Alexei Leonov, the Soviet cosmonaut who performed the first spacewalk in 1965. (Science.org/Eric Lusito)
In November 2023, photographer Eric Lusito made a rare visit to the Braude Radio Astronomy Observatory near Kharkiv, Ukraine, once one of the nation’s flagship scientific facilities. Since his visit, the Kharkiv region, which was partly occupied by Russian forces in 2022 but liberated later that year, has again faced a renewed Russian assault. As of this writing, military specialists say that effort has stalled. Here is Lusito’s account of his visit.
The mysterious brightening of a galaxy far, far away has been traced to the heart of the star system and the sudden awakening of a giant black hole 1m times more massive than the sun. Decades of observations found nothing remarkable about the distant galaxy in the constellation of Virgo, but that changed at the end of 2019 when astronomers noticed a dramatic surge in its luminosity that persists to this day. Researchers now believe they are witnessing changes that have never been seen before, with the black hole at the galaxy’s core putting on an extreme cosmic light show as vast amounts of material fall into it.
As a popular icon among objects in the Solar System, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS) is probably the best-known atmospheric structure. Its large size (right now its diameter is that of the Earth) and the contrast of its reddish colour against the planet’s pale clouds make it an object that can be easily seen even with small telescopes…Speculation about the origin of the GRS dates back to the first telescopic observations made by the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who in 1665 discovered a dark oval at the same latitude as the GRS and named it the ‘Permanent Spot’ (PS), since it was observed by him and other astronomers until 1713. Track of it was subsequently lost for 118 years and it was not until 1831 and later years that S. Schwabe again observed a clear structure, roughly oval in shape and at the same latitude as the GRS; that can be regarded as the first observation of the current GRS, perhaps of a nascent GRS.
Image (Credit): Jupiter with the small moon Amalthea appearing in its Great Red Spot. (Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS. Image processing by Gerald Eichstädt)
This week’s image comes from NASA’s Juno mission during a flyby back in March. It shows Jupiter’s smallest moon Amalthea orbiting Jupiter with the Great Red Spot in the background. The potato-shaped moon has a radius of 52 miles and completes an orbit of the giant planet in about half an Earth day.
You can read more about the photograph at this NASA site.
Image (Credit): Close-up of Jupiter with the small moon Amalthea appearing in its Great Red Spot. (Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS. Image processing by Gerald Eichstädt)
Image (Credit): View of Jupiter’s moon Io as seen by the Juno spacecraft on April 9. It was the first-ever image of the moon’s south polar region. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS. Image processing: Gerald Eichstädt/Thomas Thomopoulos (CC BY))
The Juno spacecraft is still hard a work in the vicinity of Jupiter, with its latest mission being a flyby of the moon Io earlier this month (shown above).
Two recent flybys of the moon were also combined to create an image of a lake of cooling lava (shown below and via the video here). Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton explained the new image:
Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action. We also got some great close-ups and other data on a 200-kilometer-long (127-mile-long) lava lake called Loki Patera. There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.
Juno has been zipping around Jupiter’s neighborhood since 2016. It’s main task is to study the origin and evolution of Jupiter, believed to be the first planet to have formed in our solar system. By doing so, NASA hopes to learn more about the solar system and the Earth as well.
Image (Credit): An artist’s rendering of Loki Patera, a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io, created using data from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS)
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