APOD: Jupiter Unplugged (2012 Mar 02)

[APOD Robot]

Jupiter Unplugged

Explanation: Five hand drawn sketches of Jupiter were used to create this beautifully detailed flat map of the ruling gas giant's turbulent cloud tops. Made with colored pencils at the eyepiece of a 16 inch diameter telescope, the original drawings are about 5 inches (12.5 cm) in diameter. The drawn planisphere map dimensions are 16x8 inches (40x20 cm). Observing on different dates in November and December of 2011, astronomical artist Fred Burgeot has relied on Jupiter's rotation to cover the planet's complete circumference. Digital animator Pascal Chauvet has also translated Burgeot's drawings into an intriguing video (vimeo), synthesizing a telescopic view of the rotating planet with a tilt and phase appropriate for the observing dates. The video includes the Galilean moons moving along their orbits, beginning with Ganymede and Io casting shadows as they glide in front of Jupiter, followed by Europa and Callisto passing behind the planet's banded disk.

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[Beyond]

In the video, how come the giant red spot is in the northern hemisphere?? Quick! Somebody plug Jupiter back in before it throws the whole solar system out of whack.

[Ann]

This is a very beautiful set of drawings and a splendid flat map. Lovely work, Frédéric Burgeot!

The video is delightful, too. Love the moons and their shadows!

Ann

[lutusp Ganymede]

why are the rightmost 2 Jupiter globes out of chronological order? is that on purpose?

[orin stepanek]

I love the drawings and the vimeo! Very nicely done!

[neufer]

In the video, how come the giant red spot is in the northern hemisphere?? Quick! Somebody plug Jupiter back in before it throws the whole solar system out of whack.

The original drawing probably had the image inverted/rotated since most telescopes invert/rotate images.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

[Beyond]

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Hey! Coulda youse pleasa speaka da inglish

[se qua]

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Hey! Coulda youse pleasa speaka da inglish

The more things change, the more it's the same thing.....

[alphachapmtl]

I wish we had an orbiter in the Jupiter system, something like Cassini in Saturn's system.
Too bad the Galileo mission was such a failure years ago, because of an unfurled antenna who would not budge.

[Chris Peterson]

Too bad the Galileo mission was such a failure years ago, because of an unfurled antenna who would not budge.

Are you serious? Galileo was a huge success, despite the failure of its high gain antenna. Clever engineering allowed data to be sent using the low gain antenna at a higher rate than the other antenna would have initially supported, and in the end most of the science goals were achieved. The list of new discoveries that came from this mission is very long.

[saturn2]

The clouds of Jupiter appear as atripes.
Each band seems to have its own density.

[Boomer12k]

It looks like the music staff with music notes.....Music of the Spheres?

:---[===] *

[Beyond]

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Hey! Coulda youse pleasa speaka da inglish

The more things change, the more it's the same thing.....

Ah, ok. The long version of -same old-same old-.

[neufer]

Too bad the Galileo mission was such a failure years ago, because of an unfurled antenna who would not budge.

Are you serious? Galileo was a huge success, despite the failure of its high gain antenna. Clever engineering allowed data to be sent using the low gain antenna at a higher rate than the other antenna would have initially supported, and in the end most of the science goals were achieved. The list of new discoveries that came from this mission is very long.

<<For reasons which in all likelihood will never be known with certainty, Galileo's high-gain antenna failed to fully deploy after its first flyby of Earth. Investigators speculate that during the time that Galileo spent in storage after the 1986 Challenger disaster, its lubricants evaporated, damaging the system. Engineers tried thermal-cycling the antenna, rotating the spacecraft up to its maximum spin rate of 10.5 rpm, and "hammering" the antenna deployment motors—turning them on and off repeatedly—over 13,000 times; all attempts failed to open the high-gain antenna. Fortunately, Galileo possessed an additional low-gain antenna that was capable of transmitting information back to Earth, although since it transmitted a signal isotropically, the low-gain antenna's bandwidth was significantly less than the high-gain antenna's would have been; the high-gain antenna was to have transmitted at 134 kilobits per second, whereas the low-gain antenna was only intended to transmit at about 8 to 16 bits per second. Galileo's low-gain antenna transmitted with a power of about 15 to 20 watts, which, by the time it reached Earth, and had been collected. Through the implementation of sophisticated technologies, the arraying of several Deep Space Network antennas and sensitivity upgrades to the receivers used to listen to Galileo's signal, data throughput was increased to a maximum of 160 bits per second. By further using data compression, the effective data rate could be raised to 1000 bits per second. The data collected on Jupiter and its moons was stored in the spacecraft's onboard tape recorder, and transmitted back to Earth during the long apozene portion of the probe's orbit using the low-gain antenna. At the same time, measurements were made of Jupiter's magnetosphere and transmitted back to Earth. The reduction in available bandwidth reduced the total amount of data transmitted throughout the mission, although 70% of Galileo's science goals could still be met.

The failure of Galileo's high-gain antenna meant that data storage to Galileo's tape recorder for later compression and playback was absolutely crucial in order to obtain any substantial information from the flybys of Jupiter and its moons. In October 1995, Galileo's 114-megabyte, four-track digital tape recorder, which was manufactured by Odetics Corporation, remained stuck in rewind mode for 15 hours before engineers learned what had happened and sent commands to shut it off. Though the recorder itself was still in working order, the malfunction possibly damaged a length of tape at the end of the reel. This section of tape was subsequently declared "off limits" to any future data recording, and was covered with 25 more turns of tape to secure the section and reduce any further stresses, which could tear it. Because it happened only weeks before Galileo entered orbit around Jupiter, the anomaly prompted engineers to sacrifice data acquisition of almost all of the Io and Europa observations during the orbit insertion phase, in order to focus solely on recording data sent from the Jupiter probe descent.

---

In November 2002, after the completion of the mission's only encounter with Jupiter's moon Amalthea, problems with playback of the tape recorder again plagued Galileo. About 10 minutes after the closest approach of the Amalthea flyby, Galileo stopped collecting data, shut down all of its instruments, and went into safe mode, apparently as a result of exposure to Jupiter's intense radiation environment. Though most of the Amalthea data was already written to tape, it was found that the recorder refused to respond to commands telling it to play back data. After weeks of troubleshooting of an identical flight spare of the recorder on the ground, it was determined that the cause of the malfunction was a reduction of light output in three infrared Optek OP133 light emitting diodes located in the drive electronics of the recorder's motor encoder wheel. The GaAs LEDs had been particularly sensitive to proton-irradiation-induced atomic lattice displacement defects, which greatly decreased their effective light output and caused the drive motor's electronics to falsely believe the motor encoder wheel was incorrectly positioned. Galileo's flight team then began a series of "annealing" sessions, where current was passed through the LEDs for hours at a time to heat them to a point where some of the crystalline lattice defects would be shifted back into place, thus increasing the LED's light output. After about 100 hours of annealing and playback cycles, the recorder was able to operate for up to an hour at a time. After many subsequent playback and cooling cycles, the complete transmission back to Earth of all recorded Amalthea flyby data was successful.>>

[alphachapmtl]

Thanks for the info.
It was a bad curse for Galileo that it had to be launched by the Shuttle.
It was not supposed to be so in the earliest design stage of the Galileo mission,
but it was forced upon it at a time when the shuttle was seen as the ultimate solution to everything.
I still wish for a new Jupiter mission. We could do better this time, with improved technology.
Too bad an estimated 4000 billions has been spent in Irak and Afghanistan, and it's not over yet.
Such unrestrained wasteful spending is stifling development in almost every area of american society, including of course science.

[Chris Peterson]

I still wish for a new Jupiter mission. We could do better this time, with improved technology.

We can always do better, and there can never be too many planetary exploration missions. There are few government supported programs that return more value for each dollar spent.

[bystander]

I still wish for a new Jupiter mission. We could do better this time, with improved technology.

Juno is on its way. http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=24740

[neufer]

I still wish for a new Jupiter mission. We could do better this time, with improved technology.

Juno is on its way. http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=24740

Not exactly an "orbiter in the Jupiter (moon) system" however.

[neufer]

I still wish for a new Jupiter mission. We could do better this time, with improved technology.

JUICE: Europe's next mission to Jupiter?
The Planetary Society Blog by Emily Lakdawalla, Apr. 18, 2012

<<The Twitterverse is buzzing this morning with news that the Science Programme Committee of the European Space Agency has recommended that the next large European mission be JUICE, a mission to explore the three icy Galilean satellites and eventually to orbit Ganymede. The recommendation is not binding; it must be voted upon (a simple majority vote, according to BBC News), at a meeting of the Science Programme Committee, consisting of representatives of all 19 ESA member states, on May 2. The committee is likely to green-light this recommendation, but it shouldn't be taken as a certain decision just yet.

[b][color=#0000FF]JUICE (JUpiter ICy moon Explorer) Credit: ESA[/color][/b]

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JUICE is being recommended over ATHENA (an x-ray observatory) and NGO (a gravitational wave observatory). It would launch in June 2022, enter Jupiter orbit in January 2030, and end in Ganymede orbit in June 2033. It is a concept that has been modified from JGO, the Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter, originally conceived as Europe's half of a US-Europe two-spacecraft mission to Jupiter, where NASA had originally proposed to provide a Jupiter Europa Orbiter. NASA canceled its plans to participate in that mission just as it canceled its participation in ExoMars more recently, and as with ExoMars, ESA appears ready to go forward without the USA. In fact, ESA has modified the originally proposed JGO mission to incorporate some of the science goals that would have been accomplished by NASA's Europa mission.

Here's the mission description and profile from the ESA document:

Science goals: The JUICE mission will visit the Jupiter system concentrating on the characterization of Ganymede, Europa and Callisto as planetary objects and potential habitats and on the exploration of the Jupiter system considered as an archetype for gas giants in the solar system and elsewhere. The focus of JUICE is to characterize the conditions that may have led to the emergence of habitable environments among the Jovian icy satellites, with special emphasis on the three ocean-bearing worlds, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. The mission will also focus on characterizing the diversity of processes in the Jupiter system which may be required in order to provide a stable environment at Ganymede, Europa and Callisto on geologic time scales, including gravitational coupling between the Galilean satellites and their long term tidal influence on the system as a whole.

Mission profile: The mission will be launched in June 2022 by an Ariane 5 ECA and will perform a 7.5 yr cruise toward Jupiter based on an Earth-Venus-Earth-Earth gravitational assist. The Jupiter orbit insertion will be performed in January 2030, and will be followed by a tour of the Jupiter system, comprising a transfer to Callisto (11 months), a phase studying Europa (with 2 flybys) and Callisto (with 3 flybys) lasting one month, a "Jupiter high-latitude phase" that includes 9 Callisto flybys (lasting 9 months) and the transfer to Ganymede (lasting 11 months). In September 2032 the spacecraft is inserted into orbit around Ganymede, starting with elliptical and high altitude circular orbits (for 5 months) followed by a phase in a medium altitude (500 km) circular orbit (3 months) and by a final phase in low altitude (200 km) circular orbit (1 month). The end of the nominal mission is foreseen in June 2033.

Spacecraft description: The spacecraft is 3-axis stabilised, and powered by solar panels, providing around 650 W at end of mission. Communication to Earth is provided by a fixed 3.2 m diameter high-gain antenna, in X and Ka bands, with a downlink capacity of at least 1.4 Gbit/day. To perform its tour of the Jupiter system the spacecraft will have a ΔV capability of 2700 m/s, and the shielding will limit radiation to 240 krad at the centre of a 10 mm Al solid sphere. The spacecraft dry mass at launch will be approximately 1.8 tons. While the actual payload will be chosen through a competitive AO process, the study has identified a model payload based on a suite of 11 instrument totalling 104 kg. These comprise cameras, spectrometers, a sub-mm wave instrument, a laser altimeter, an ice-penetrating radar, a magnetometer, a particle package, a radio and plasma wave instrument as well as a radio science instrument and ultra-stable oscillator.

A separate document, a presentation to the Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting in March 2012, details the model payload (thanks to Van Kane for this link):

• Narrow-angle camera
  Wide-angle camera
  Visible Infrared Hyperspectral Imaging Spectrometer
  UV Imaging Spectrometer
  Sub-millimeter Wave Instrument
  Magnetometer
  Radio and Plasma Wave Instrument
  Particle and Plasma Instrument - Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer
  Laser Altimeter
  Ice Penetrating Radar
  Radio Science Instrument

This selection -- if it is accepted -- represents a big win for planetary science and a big loss for space-based astrophysics in Europe. Which is, one can't help but notice, opposite to what the currently-proposed NASA budget represents.>>