22 ms·

Jupiter’s North Pole Unlike Anything Encountered in Solar System

237 points by betolink 10y ago

numlocked 10y ago
"The download of six megabytes of data collected during the six-hour transit, from above Jupiter’s north pole to below its south pole, took one-and-a-half days." ...surely that's a typo and they mean gigabytes?
- lotkowskim 10y ago
  Nope, it just takes this long for the data to travel 588 million kilometres [1]. Also the space craft will have a low powered transmitter. [1] http://www.space.com/18383-how-far-away-is-jupiter.html http://www.space.com/18383-how-far-away-is-jupiter.html
- doikor 10y ago
  The solar panels that Juno has produce only 500 watts of power. You would need a lot more then that to be sending gigabytes of data in any meaningful timeframe. So yes it really is just six megabytes of data taking 30h+ to download. Btw the panels would produce 14kW at earth orbit but suns power goes down quite fast as you move away from it. Also the farthest from the Sun we've ever used solar panels. Traditionally missions this far from the Sun have used some kind of a nuclear power source (RTGs). Though I don't think they could produce 500 watts without being very big. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4818 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4818
  - jnicholasp 10y ago
    Transmission is one thing, but collection is another: did they really only collect 6 megabytes of data over the course of a 6 hour flyby? Off topic, ish: does anyone know how large a solar panel array would have to be to supply all of our current energy use, if the array orbited the Sun at the same distance Mercury does?
    - jccooper 10y ago
      Almost all of the instruments on Juno are non-visual. The camera was included mostly for PR purposes. 6MB is pretty good for one-dimensional data streams.
    - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
      In the era of big hard drives and fat pipes, people forget that 6 megabytes is a lot of raw data if it's not packed with unnecessary GUI elements, high-res video, and inefficient code.
      - Aeolos 10y ago
        On the other hand, 6MB is the typical file size for the jpg-compressed images taken by my 20MP smartphone camera. It is all a matter of perspective.
        frandroid 10y ago
        That's pretty much packed with a lot of useless information, considering the average usage of uploading the picture to Facebook. :P
        tokai 10y ago
        Juno's camera is 1,9MP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam
    - daeken 10y ago
      According to Wikipedia, the world's average energy consumption is 12.3Tw. Given that the Earth is gets 1366 W/m² of solar power at 149,597,870km, this means Mercury gets 9190 W/m² at 57,910,000km. Plugging these together, this tells us that a 12.3Tw solar array of 100% efficiency in Mercury's orbit would have a surface area of 1338 km². Realistically, you'd at least double that, to produce the same power, as solar panels are <50% efficient.
      - jnicholasp 10y ago
- hoorayimhelping 10y ago
  Why "surely"? One of the main things about the Juno probe is how underpowered its tech is.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  Google Fiber really needs to step up the interplanetary deployment!
  - dikei 10y ago
    Imagine you need to ping google.com from mars. The round trip would be at least 40 minutes. Put a whole new meaning into the word lag. Seriously though, the current TCP/IP protocol is not designed to deal with that kind of distance.
    - pseudointellect 10y ago
      You mean the current speed of light is not designed to deal with that kind of distance.
- vvanders 10y ago
  When I was looking into Forward Error Correction a while back all of the impressive stuff was for downlinks from remote space probes. I don't know any specifics around the Juno probe however most of the techniques usually sent 2-3x the amount of data actually downloaded because a missed frame was 1.5hrs(43mins @ Speed of light from Earth->Jupiter). Being able to reconstruct a frame with redundant data was critical. Combined with a low power transmitter 6mb is pretty reasonable.
jobu 10y ago
“Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole,” said Bolton. “There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is.” This is the first I've heard of Saturn's hexagon, very interesting: http://www.space.com/30608-mysterious-saturn-hexagon-explained.html http://www.space.com/30608-mysterious-saturn-hexagon-explain...
- apaprocki 10y ago
  Some threads I read on another site described it as perturbations of a periodic wave moving around the pole in a circle.. modeled something like this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+x%5E2+%2B+y%5E2+%3D+1+%2B+0.07*sin(+6*atan2(x,y) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+x%5E2+%2B+y%5E2+%3...) or http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=r+%3D+1+%2B+cos(6*theta)%2F30 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=r+%3D+1+%2B+cos(6*theta...
  - 3pt14159 10y ago
    Doesn't seem to hold up to a sensitivity analysis as much as one would expect given how long it has remained stable.
- SilasX 10y ago
  >The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. Hold on -- how much do we know about the poles of gas giants in other solar systems? I'm guessing we can't get a good look or anything... Edit: added quote to clarify what I was responding to.
  - undersuit 10y ago
    Saturn has a tilt just a bit more than the Earth and it experiences seasons; the pole is rotated something like 26 degrees into our field of vision in "winter". Uranus is actually rotating on it's side. http://www.setterfield.org/Astronomy/pictures/axial-tilt-planets.jpg http://www.setterfield.org/Astronomy/pictures/axial-tilt-pla...
dmreedy 10y ago
Absolutely breathtaking. Interesting that they phrase the headline almost as if to imply uniqueness. My impression was that Saturn's hexagon was the unique situation (occurring, hypothetically, only under very specific conditions). Is it expected then that Uranus and Neptune's poles will look different still?
- mcguire 10y ago
  Uranus has an axial tilt of around 90°, so it is undoubtedly completely wacky. I have no idea what Neptune's looks like.
  - gregwtmtno 10y ago
    No one does. Neptune and Uranus have been visited by only Voyager 2. Neptune's pole wasn't covered in the flyby.
thecamelisdead 10y ago
Is there a factory on jupiter?
jl6 10y ago
I understand Juno flew as close as 4,200km. Are there any pictures from that distance? The closest here says it was taken from 38,000km.
- Diederich 10y ago
  Given the exceptionally slow transfer rate, I suspect we will be seeing even better images over the next few weeks.
modzu 10y ago
based on the obvious banding from the side i always assumed the top might in fact look like a hexagon.. looking forward to seeing more!!
jpfed 10y ago
I wonder if the clouds don't separate into bands as much at those latitudes because the velocity (due to the planet's rotation) is lower closer to the poles.
- astazangasta 10y ago
  The Coriolis force is strongest at the poles and weakest at the equator, so I presume there would be more rotation and thus less banding near the poles due to this effect. The origin of the banding is supposedly similar to the banding on Earth, which has three broad 'bands' driven by Hadley cells (polar, mid-lattitude, tropical), driven by convective heating moving energy away from the equator towards the poles, except presumably Jupiter has much more energy and therefore more convection and more bands. I only have a very crude understanding of atmospheric forces, though, so paging someone who knows better.
vacri 10y ago
> “Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole,” said Bolton. “There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is.” Eh? Jupiter is 'truly unique' because it doesn't have an extremely puzzling feature that only one other planet is known to have?
- tizzdogg 10y ago
  Why are people getting bent out of shape about the word "unique"? It is unique because Jupiter has features that we have not observed on any other planet, some of which are mentioned in the article (different types of storm systems, high altitude clouds casting shadows etc). From context, he is clearly not only talking about Saturn's hexagon. This pedantry is ridiculous.
  - Bjartr 10y ago
    People are confused. As was I at first. Considering the emphasis "truly unique" I expected more treatment of that point by the article. By not having that I was left feeling like I missed something / confused. People generally don't like feeling confused. Personally, I don't understand the people defending the usage here. As far as I have experienced in my life, when people say "unique" in good faith they mean "one of a kind" and those people who don't use it that way are considered to have done a bait-and-switch. That said, perhaps there's been a lingustic shift I haven't yet noticed.
  - vacri 10y ago
    > "One of the most notable findings of these first-ever pictures of Jupiter’s north and south poles is something that the JunoCam imager did not see." No, the article is actually saying that the lack of a hexagon is important. Combined with such insights as "some clouds are higher than other things", the mentioned items really don't add up to a breathless "truly unique". The things we already knew about Jupiter - the vibrant bands and the red dot as obvious starters - are far more interesting and worthy of a discussion about what makes the planet unique.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
krylon 10y ago
Ignoring all the fascinating stuff about Jupiter, let me point out this gem: The download of six megabytes of data [...] took one-and-a-half days I sometimes like to scare kids by telling them about the time when I surfed the Internet with 14.4 kbit modem, but even that looks incredibly fast compared to the speed of interplanetary data transmission (back then, 6 MiB would have taken me about 2-2.5 hours). (NB that I am not complaining or anything, just pointing out that this is many orders of magnitudes slower than anything one would normally consider a "slow" connection.)
- btgeekboy 10y ago
  It's also fascinating to think about how TCP is ineffective at that distance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet is a good starting point to learn more.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    TCP had to be revisited when Wifi became popular. Space is that x 10000.
  - visarga 10y ago
    That means when humans finally colonize Mars, there will be two FaceBooks, FB Mars and FB Earth, with any communication between them running at a lag. I bet there will be AI research to create bots to act in "real time" on your behalf on the opposite planet. If the artificial agent can imitate your own actions and judgements, it would be a good way to surpass the speed of light. It will be necessary to build these agents because other interested parties could use the time lag to unfairly gain an advantage over you. The more we explore, the larger the time lag. With Jupyter it is 33-53 minutes. With Pluto it's 5h. The nearest star - 4 years. The Moon is at 1.3s.
    - zeroer 10y ago
      The last thing I need is a realtime Facebook now. I feel like I should build in a delay of ~1 week to everything I do.
Pica_soO 10y ago
Where does that infrared heat orginate? Fission?
- GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
  Probably a combination of radioactive decay and gravitational collapse.
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    Probably another dumb question, if you would pump heat into this, and increase the isolation factor - could you produce a brown dwarf?
    - nikdaheratik 10y ago
      The lower theoretical threshold for a brown dwarf star, which fuses deuterium->lithium, is 13 times the mass of Jupiter. There isn't enough mass for fusion to occur on its own no matter how energetic the particles are.
      - Pica_soO 10y ago
        Thanks.
- nikdaheratik 10y ago
  There are several sources of heat on Jupiter but the one being studied by this mission is the result of the very large magnetic field around Jupiter's generating auroras that are several times larger than the diameter of Earth. [edit] Original statement wasn't completely accurate, as it does study the auroras, but they are generated by the planet itself. The solar wind doesn't reach the atmosphere of Jupiter.
powera 10y ago
There are only 8 planets in the solar system (well, 9 with Pluto). "Unique" isn't a terribly high bar here.
justifier 10y ago
the second video says: > the infrared data captured a faint aurora when talking about aurora strength which variable is predominant: the magnetosphere, the atmosphere, or amount of solar radiation? also, can anyone speak to the reason for the noisy instrument detecting those 3.45 micron wavelengths? why is the bottom edge so active?

237 points by betolink 10y ago

"The download of six megabytes of data collected during the six-hour transit, from above Jupiter’s north pole to below its south pole, took one-and-a-half days." ...surely that's a typo and they mean gigabytes?

lotkowskim 10y ago
Nope, it just takes this long for the data to travel 588 million kilometres [1]. Also the space craft will have a low powered transmitter. [1] http://www.space.com/18383-how-far-away-is-jupiter.html http://www.space.com/18383-how-far-away-is-jupiter.html
doikor 10y ago
The solar panels that Juno has produce only 500 watts of power. You would need a lot more then that to be sending gigabytes of data in any meaningful timeframe. So yes it really is just six megabytes of data taking 30h+ to download. Btw the panels would produce 14kW at earth orbit but suns power goes down quite fast as you move away from it. Also the farthest from the Sun we've ever used solar panels. Traditionally missions this far from the Sun have used some kind of a nuclear power source (RTGs). Though I don't think they could produce 500 watts without being very big. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4818 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4818
- jnicholasp 10y ago
  Transmission is one thing, but collection is another: did they really only collect 6 megabytes of data over the course of a 6 hour flyby? Off topic, ish: does anyone know how large a solar panel array would have to be to supply all of our current energy use, if the array orbited the Sun at the same distance Mercury does?
  - jccooper 10y ago
    Almost all of the instruments on Juno are non-visual. The camera was included mostly for PR purposes. 6MB is pretty good for one-dimensional data streams.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    In the era of big hard drives and fat pipes, people forget that 6 megabytes is a lot of raw data if it's not packed with unnecessary GUI elements, high-res video, and inefficient code.
    - Aeolos 10y ago
      On the other hand, 6MB is the typical file size for the jpg-compressed images taken by my 20MP smartphone camera. It is all a matter of perspective.
      - frandroid 10y ago
        That's pretty much packed with a lot of useless information, considering the average usage of uploading the picture to Facebook. :P
      - tokai 10y ago
        Juno's camera is 1,9MP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam
  - daeken 10y ago
    According to Wikipedia, the world's average energy consumption is 12.3Tw. Given that the Earth is gets 1366 W/m² of solar power at 149,597,870km, this means Mercury gets 9190 W/m² at 57,910,000km. Plugging these together, this tells us that a 12.3Tw solar array of 100% efficiency in Mercury's orbit would have a surface area of 1338 km². Realistically, you'd at least double that, to produce the same power, as solar panels are <50% efficient.
    - jnicholasp 10y ago
hoorayimhelping 10y ago
Why "surely"? One of the main things about the Juno probe is how underpowered its tech is.
BurningFrog 10y ago
Google Fiber really needs to step up the interplanetary deployment!
- dikei 10y ago
  Imagine you need to ping google.com from mars. The round trip would be at least 40 minutes. Put a whole new meaning into the word lag. Seriously though, the current TCP/IP protocol is not designed to deal with that kind of distance.
  - pseudointellect 10y ago
    You mean the current speed of light is not designed to deal with that kind of distance.
vvanders 10y ago
When I was looking into Forward Error Correction a while back all of the impressive stuff was for downlinks from remote space probes. I don't know any specifics around the Juno probe however most of the techniques usually sent 2-3x the amount of data actually downloaded because a missed frame was 1.5hrs(43mins @ Speed of light from Earth->Jupiter). Being able to reconstruct a frame with redundant data was critical. Combined with a low power transmitter 6mb is pretty reasonable.

jobu 10y ago

“Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole,” said Bolton. “There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is.” This is the first I've heard of Saturn's hexagon, very interesting: http://www.space.com/30608-mysterious-saturn-hexagon-explained.html http://www.space.com/30608-mysterious-saturn-hexagon-explain...

apaprocki 10y ago
Some threads I read on another site described it as perturbations of a periodic wave moving around the pole in a circle.. modeled something like this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+x%5E2+%2B+y%5E2+%3D+1+%2B+0.07*sin(+6*atan2(x,y) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+x%5E2+%2B+y%5E2+%3...) or http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=r+%3D+1+%2B+cos(6*theta)%2F30 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=r+%3D+1+%2B+cos(6*theta...
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  Doesn't seem to hold up to a sensitivity analysis as much as one would expect given how long it has remained stable.
SilasX 10y ago
>The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. Hold on -- how much do we know about the poles of gas giants in other solar systems? I'm guessing we can't get a good look or anything... Edit: added quote to clarify what I was responding to.
- undersuit 10y ago
  Saturn has a tilt just a bit more than the Earth and it experiences seasons; the pole is rotated something like 26 degrees into our field of vision in "winter". Uranus is actually rotating on it's side. http://www.setterfield.org/Astronomy/pictures/axial-tilt-planets.jpg http://www.setterfield.org/Astronomy/pictures/axial-tilt-pla...

dmreedy 10y ago

Absolutely breathtaking. Interesting that they phrase the headline almost as if to imply uniqueness. My impression was that Saturn's hexagon was the unique situation (occurring, hypothetically, only under very specific conditions). Is it expected then that Uranus and Neptune's poles will look different still?

mcguire 10y ago
Uranus has an axial tilt of around 90°, so it is undoubtedly completely wacky. I have no idea what Neptune's looks like.
- gregwtmtno 10y ago
  No one does. Neptune and Uranus have been visited by only Voyager 2. Neptune's pole wasn't covered in the flyby.

thecamelisdead 10y ago

Is there a factory on jupiter?

jl6 10y ago

I understand Juno flew as close as 4,200km. Are there any pictures from that distance? The closest here says it was taken from 38,000km.

Diederich 10y ago
Given the exceptionally slow transfer rate, I suspect we will be seeing even better images over the next few weeks.

modzu 10y ago

based on the obvious banding from the side i always assumed the top might in fact look like a hexagon.. looking forward to seeing more!!

jpfed 10y ago

I wonder if the clouds don't separate into bands as much at those latitudes because the velocity (due to the planet's rotation) is lower closer to the poles.

astazangasta 10y ago
The Coriolis force is strongest at the poles and weakest at the equator, so I presume there would be more rotation and thus less banding near the poles due to this effect. The origin of the banding is supposedly similar to the banding on Earth, which has three broad 'bands' driven by Hadley cells (polar, mid-lattitude, tropical), driven by convective heating moving energy away from the equator towards the poles, except presumably Jupiter has much more energy and therefore more convection and more bands. I only have a very crude understanding of atmospheric forces, though, so paging someone who knows better.

vacri 10y ago

> “Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole,” said Bolton. “There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is.” Eh? Jupiter is 'truly unique' because it doesn't have an extremely puzzling feature that only one other planet is known to have?

tizzdogg 10y ago
Why are people getting bent out of shape about the word "unique"? It is unique because Jupiter has features that we have not observed on any other planet, some of which are mentioned in the article (different types of storm systems, high altitude clouds casting shadows etc). From context, he is clearly not only talking about Saturn's hexagon. This pedantry is ridiculous.
- Bjartr 10y ago
  People are confused. As was I at first. Considering the emphasis "truly unique" I expected more treatment of that point by the article. By not having that I was left feeling like I missed something / confused. People generally don't like feeling confused. Personally, I don't understand the people defending the usage here. As far as I have experienced in my life, when people say "unique" in good faith they mean "one of a kind" and those people who don't use it that way are considered to have done a bait-and-switch. That said, perhaps there's been a lingustic shift I haven't yet noticed.
- vacri 10y ago
  > "One of the most notable findings of these first-ever pictures of Jupiter’s north and south poles is something that the JunoCam imager did not see." No, the article is actually saying that the lack of a hexagon is important. Combined with such insights as "some clouds are higher than other things", the mentioned items really don't add up to a breathless "truly unique". The things we already knew about Jupiter - the vibrant bands and the red dot as obvious starters - are far more interesting and worthy of a discussion about what makes the planet unique.
- jessriedel 10y ago

krylon 10y ago

Ignoring all the fascinating stuff about Jupiter, let me point out this gem: The download of six megabytes of data [...] took one-and-a-half days I sometimes like to scare kids by telling them about the time when I surfed the Internet with 14.4 kbit modem, but even that looks incredibly fast compared to the speed of interplanetary data transmission (back then, 6 MiB would have taken me about 2-2.5 hours). (NB that I am not complaining or anything, just pointing out that this is many orders of magnitudes slower than anything one would normally consider a "slow" connection.)

btgeekboy 10y ago
It's also fascinating to think about how TCP is ineffective at that distance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet is a good starting point to learn more.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  TCP had to be revisited when Wifi became popular. Space is that x 10000.
- visarga 10y ago
  That means when humans finally colonize Mars, there will be two FaceBooks, FB Mars and FB Earth, with any communication between them running at a lag. I bet there will be AI research to create bots to act in "real time" on your behalf on the opposite planet. If the artificial agent can imitate your own actions and judgements, it would be a good way to surpass the speed of light. It will be necessary to build these agents because other interested parties could use the time lag to unfairly gain an advantage over you. The more we explore, the larger the time lag. With Jupyter it is 33-53 minutes. With Pluto it's 5h. The nearest star - 4 years. The Moon is at 1.3s.
  - zeroer 10y ago
    The last thing I need is a realtime Facebook now. I feel like I should build in a delay of ~1 week to everything I do.

Pica_soO 10y ago

Where does that infrared heat orginate? Fission?

GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
Probably a combination of radioactive decay and gravitational collapse.
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  Probably another dumb question, if you would pump heat into this, and increase the isolation factor - could you produce a brown dwarf?
  - nikdaheratik 10y ago
    The lower theoretical threshold for a brown dwarf star, which fuses deuterium->lithium, is 13 times the mass of Jupiter. There isn't enough mass for fusion to occur on its own no matter how energetic the particles are.
    - Pica_soO 10y ago
      Thanks.
nikdaheratik 10y ago
There are several sources of heat on Jupiter but the one being studied by this mission is the result of the very large magnetic field around Jupiter's generating auroras that are several times larger than the diameter of Earth. [edit] Original statement wasn't completely accurate, as it does study the auroras, but they are generated by the planet itself. The solar wind doesn't reach the atmosphere of Jupiter.

powera 10y ago

There are only 8 planets in the solar system (well, 9 with Pluto). "Unique" isn't a terribly high bar here.

justifier 10y ago

the second video says: > the infrared data captured a faint aurora when talking about aurora strength which variable is predominant: the magnetosphere, the atmosphere, or amount of solar radiation? also, can anyone speak to the reason for the noisy instrument detecting those 3.45 micron wavelengths? why is the bottom edge so active?