Jupiter is a big, complex, chaotic planet. It has long been known as the most dominant feature in our sun’s orbit, but it wasn’t until last May that the planet’s internal features began to be revealed. During a few close passes, NASA’s $1.1 billion Juno spacecraft collected data on the gas giant that revealed cyclones the size of Earth and a surprisingly strong magnetic field.
Now, data collected by Juno have uncovered more never-before-seen features on its north and south poles. In a study published this week in the journal Nature, a team of scientists report bizarre geometric storms surrounding a single massive cyclone on each of the planet’s poles. The storms measure seven thousands miles across and reach wind speeds nearing 220 miles per hour, which would classify them as Category 5 hurricane here on Earth.
On July 4, 2016, Juno rendezvoused with Jupiter to perform a series of close passes that would bring the spacecraft just a couple thousands miles above the gas giant’s top cloud layer. Using its sophisticated instruments, Juno began to peer beneath the planet’s clouds for the first time, snapping photos and measuring Jupiter’s infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, gravity, and magnetic features.
Among the many mysteries Juno scientists sought to uncover were Jupiter’s poles, previously hidden from our telescopes due to the planet’s nonexistent tilt. When Juno finally beamed back images of the north pole, scientists were shocked to find eight cyclones circling a single storm in the middle. Later, the south pole presented a similar arrangement with five outer storms.
Alberto Adriani, a co-investigator for Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) and lead author of the paper, explained that the storms are likely the result of Jupiter’s heat and rotation speed.
“The high rotation of the planet — about 10 hours for a complete turn around its axis — and the heat coming from the lower levels of the atmosphere certainly have a great impact to the formation of the cyclonic pattern we have observed over the Jupiter’s poles,” he told Digital Trends.
As with many space discoveries, it’s not always clear how or why the findings are relevant to us on Earth. Sure, Jupiter’s strange storms are cool, but why does it matter?
“Space research has a triple value,” Adriani said. There’s the knowledge itself, the search for which “pushes our minds to try to understand what we don’t know.” Then there are the technological advances that enable such a discovery in the first place, some of which can be used to study things like space weather, which have an immediate impact on Earth.
“Last but not least, economically speaking every euro [or dollar] invested in research comes back to the society,” Adriani, and that return on investment is often multiplied by many factors.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.