A unique and gorgeous view of Jupiter

October 9, 2023   Issue #627

Subscribers wax largely in my life 

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a description so you can grok it

I love photos of our solar system taken from vantage points other than Earth — we literally get a very different view of otherwise familiar objects.

Take, for example, this shot of Jupiter. Does it look weird to you? Can you think of why?

This image was taken by the Juno spacecraft, which launched in 2011 and has been orbiting Jupiter for over seven years now. It’s on a polar orbit, passing over the north pole of the planet on a hugely elongated path that takes it from over eight million kilometers out to a hair-raising 4,200 km over the pole. When it’s at perijove, the closest point in its trajectory to the planet, Juno takes phenomenal images of Jupiter using its cameras, including the JunoCam, the instrument that took the image above.

In that shot you can see Jupiter’s broad striped clouds, the Great Red Spot, and even Europa, one of its four large “Galilean” moons, just to the lower right of the planet.

So what’s weird about this pic?

Jupiter is gibbous! It’s about 3/4s full, with the terminator, the day/night line, curving down on the right.

That’s strange to my eyes because it’s a view we literally cannot get from Earth!

Earth orbits the Sun about 150 million kilometers out, but Jupiter is five times farther from the Sun than we are. So when we look toward Jupiter we’re always looking away from the Sun, making the planet look full. Even when Earth is at a right angle from the Sun, we only see Jupiter “from the side” a little bit. It can look slightly off full, but never gibbous like this. We just can’t see it from this angle.

The photo itself isn’t really that much sharper or higher resolution than you can get from Earth with a big ‘scope, but no matter how big a telescope you use, from Earth Jupiter can never look like this.

The only way we can get a shot like this is via spacecraft. You have to go there.

So yeah, this shot is a beauty, and we can appreciate it for that alone. But when you know more about it, that beauty becomes that much more rare and precious.

We go to space, and we explore. It’s one of the best things we do.

P.S. This photo was processed by the amazing Kevin Gill, and you should absolutely look over his Flickr set of space images, because wow.

News Roundup

Who can keep up with everything these days?

• MOXIE, an experiment on the Perseverance Mars rover to produce oxygen in situ from Martian air, has completed its mission. It performed far better than engineers hoped, and will lead the way to creating even more breathable air on Mars for future explorers.

• California actually had an excess of energy production this summer and was easily able to meet needs thanks in part to green energy, batteries, and people managing their power wisely. Europe did well, too! Even Texas has done OK, surprising given how awful and corrupt their energy system is. A reminder, too, that July 2023 was the hottest July on record globally.

• I love seeing this: study after study show that giving money (or inexpensive housing) to people who are homeless winds up helping them hugely and even saves money in the long run. Now a new study reaffirms this: They gave a one-time unconditional CAD$7,500 each to 50 people who were experiencing homelessness, and over one year they had less homelessness, less “temptation” spending, and even saved $777 of social spending each! In other words, it costs less to just give people money, and it helps lift them out of a poverty cycle. Of course, the GOP will never ever go for this because you can only give money to rich people.

• I missed it, but I passed something of a milestone recently: I turned two years old. Saturn years, that is! The exact length of its year depends on various factors, but it’s about 10,755 Earth days. I was twice that age not too long ago, weirdly coincidental with my (very much not second) birthday on Earth. I can’t wait until I turn three!

Et alia

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