
Interplanetry science
For the win!
Scientists were expecting a lot of new data from the Juno space probe orbiting Jupiter, and they haven't been disappointed. The most massive planet in the Solar System is turning out to have a lot of surprises. In a press conference on Thursday, NASA engineers and astrophysicists detailed the first science results from the …
"I'll assume you're not trolling... Both are terms in American baseball for two distinct types of pitches"
NASA uses a phrase incomprehensible to much of the remaining English-speaking world. So much for science communication.
"It's just not cricket" as I said to the chap at silly mid on while I was at square leg. Then the bowler delivered a chinaman and the striker was LBW. At that point the heavens opened and in the end it was all down to the Duckworth-Lewis method.
British sporting metaphors are so much more understandable.
Duh, we have to find the sentinel on the Moon first!
Methinks it is a mistake....
"Due to telecommunications constraints, Juno will only be able to return about 40 megabytes of camera data during each 11-day orbital period. This downlink average data rate of around 325 bits per second will limit the number of images that are captured and transmitted during each orbit to somewhere between 10 and 1000 depending on the compression level used"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam
6GB more likely. 40Meg of camera data but much more of other stuff.
Due to telecommunications constraints, Juno will only be able to return about 40 megabytes of camera data during each 11-day orbital period.
Isn't Juno stuck in a 22-day orbital period because of thruster malfunction? If so, it should be able to deliver more data per pass, correct?
People wonder what's the point of going to these other planets. One use is to calibrate the General Circulation Models used in Earth weather modelling with those of Jupiter, Mars and Venus.
They are all planets and a really good model should work everywhere, provided the right parameter values are inserted.
Best news. You'd never have trouble with a compass not working. OTOH the radiation will cook you. Incidentally I'd doubt the Earth's magnetic field is quite at constant as people think, given that Magnetic Anomaly Detection is a tool of geophysicists for detecting ore bodies (and the occasional nuclear submarine)
I look forward to the first probe powered by one of the Kilopower nuclear reactor systems (or KRUSTY) which should allow ion thrusters to be used to get there then increase the data rate a fair bit.
Worth mentioning in this context that people do actually use GCMs to model the atmospheres of other planets (ie this is not just a 'we could do this in theory' thing). The stuff I knew about was expolanets, but you are completely right that modelling other planets in the Solar system is particularly good as we can get good actual data with which to compare the models.
(I am sure OP knows this: I'm just putting this here for other people.)