Juno spacecraft’s first report on Jupiter, plus news about science blogging

JUNO REPORTS ON JUPITER'S DOINGS

The Juno spacecraft has delivered her first data dump on her target Jupiter, the largest object in our Solar System. The result is dozens of papers in Geophysical Research Letters and two in Science. Plus lots of surprises. These despite the fact that data so far come from only a few passes over Jupiter's poles and thus only a small portion of what will be generated by the time scientists destroy her next year.

Juno's arrival at Jupiter on July 4 last year, described here at On Science Blogs, was as close to perfect as possible. But the spacecraft developed problems last fall, which meant altering its planned orbit schedule.

An infrared image of Jupiter from Juno. The aurora is false-colored blue and internal glow is red. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM

The data came from three orbits, according to Deborah Byrd at EarthSky. Scientists expect Juno's instruments to be fatally damaged by radiation before long. The schedule calls for them to cast Juno out of orbit next year to a lethal disintegration on the planet, the point being to prevent any possible contamination.

Ryan F. Mandelbaum summarized the data surprises at Gizmodo, "initial observations show a gravitational field differing from scientist's original expectations, poles with lots of clustered storms more chaotic than Saturn's, a magnetic field twice as strong as expected, and crazy process for generating auroras, probably far different from Earth's."

It is, in fact, a fine example of how science works, Mandelbaum says. "Theorists create all sorts of models to try to explain data, and scientists tend to favor the simplest ones. But those models often aren't quite right. Now that observers have actually collected data, theorists need to go back and try to figure out what the heck is going on."

About those auroras: On Earth, auroras (aka Northern and Southern Lights) come and go depending on Sun activity. Jupiter's auroras are permanent over both poles, Byrd explains. Juno's scientists say they think different processes are at work there, involving different energetic particles.

A false-color image of Jupiter's southern aurora from Juno , collected during the spacecraft's 3rd orbit around the planet. The inset at top right is an image of Earth's south pole aurora, approximately to scale. Credit: NASA/ SwRI.

And then there's Jupiter's weather. "The probe sent microwaves into the deep atmosphere and detected gigantic weather systems created by ammonia plumes emanating from the equator—a wider version of Earth's own trade winds," says Karla Lant at Futurism. She also notes, "on July 11, Juno will pass over the Great Red Spot, and hopefully tell us more about the most famous storm in the Solar System — and perhaps about our Universe's origins as well."

Juno also has revealed that Jupiter's magnetic field is nearly twice as strong as expected, the strongest in the Solar System, and "that the planet's core may be larger and more dilute than anticipated, with heavy metals and rock slowly dissolving in a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen," says Nadia Drake, who blogs at No Place Like Home.

For most of us, the big harvest from Juno data is the mind-boggling photos put together by exceptionally talented folk with no particular connection to NASA. Always PR-conscious, NASA has put raw data from JunoCam on a public site. Enthusiasts have embraced the concept and gone to work, producing ravishing images from the raw data. Nancy Atkinson describes the project–and shares glorious examples–at UniverseToday.

At Why Evolution is True, Matthew Cobb has shared a 3-minute animation of an approach to Jupiter put together by Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran from JunoCam data captured during the May 19 flyby. As if the images weren't stunning enough, someone has tarted up the video with music from Dave Bowman's final journey in the Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Cobb also shares the relevant clip from the movie, but you'll have to endure a commercial to see it.)

You, too, can see Jupiter, and with no need to travel or risk the intense radiation that will kill off Juno eventually. The biggest planet will be easily visible from Earth in June, and at convenient times too: rising about dusk and seeable for most of the night. Details from Bruce McClure and Deborah Byrd at EarthSky.

Closup of the North polar region of Jupiter, dotted with enormous cyclones. Some are 900 miles wide and can soar more than 60 miles high, out of the planet's atmosphere. Credit: MSSS/SwRI/JPL-Caltech/NASA

WHAT'S UP WITH SCIENCE BLOGGING?

Andy Extance, the editor-in-chief at the science blog aggregator ScienceSeeker, has been mulling over the present and possible future of science blogging. (ScienceSeeker's "goal is to be the world's most comprehensive aggregator of science discussions, all organized by topic.")

This musing was prompted by the fact that he's been chasing down and cutting off dead blogs. This database pruning has brought ScienceSeeker's total down from 2170 science blogs in January 2016 to 2065 in May 2017. He doesn't find the decline worrying, he says. Instead it has shown him "how science sites are adapting to a changing blogging environment."

Among the trends Extance notes is the fact that Nature seems to be edging away from blogging. He points out that Nature is no longer involved in SciLogs, a joint venture with the German-language Spectrum.de. I checked, and Scitable, blogs from NatureEducation, is still very much in business, but nature.com.blogs declares itself to be Closed for Maintenance.  Just plain "closed" appears to be more accurate; visitors are redirected to Nature news URLs.

I don't know what the blogging deal is at Science. Derek Lowe's fine pharma blog In the Pipeline is now to be found at Science Translational Medicine, where it is declared to be "an editorially independent blog." But a cursory search elsewhere on the Science site didn't reveal other bloggers. I'd love to know if there are any.

Extance also says that some blogs are gone from other networks, although the networks themselves are anything but empty: Field of Science, ScienceBlogs, Scientific American (the SciAm blog index can be found here), and Sciblogs.nz.  The PLOS Blog Network, where On Science Blogs resides, seems to be doing swell.

Still, Extance says, there are plenty of new science blogs too, posted at Blogger, WordPress, Medium, and Forbes. I assume they can be found by consulting ScienceSeeker's list of blog feeds, which can be found in the right-hand column of ScienceSeeker's pages.

Extance also mentions a point that has been mystifying–and irritating–me as well. An increasing number of blogs don't seem to generate RSS or Atom feeds. Why? He can't fathom it, and neither can I. Both of us depend on RSS feeds.

How do bloggers expect readers to keep up with them? Some blogging tools permit email notifications, but that's useless for me because I need to be able to find blogs that are discussing the topics I want to write about. I need a searchable feed reader.

After floundering for a while after Google killed off its excellent feed reader (why? WHY?) in 2013, I'm still able to use an RSS reader. That's because I finally found the quite satisfactory (and very searchable–and FREE!) RSSOwl. Strongly recommended.

Source: Juno spacecraft's first report on Jupiter, plus news about science blogging