It is almost one year since the ‘New Horizons’ mission left earth, bound for Pluto. The spacecraft will spend six months studying Jupiter. New Horizon has been able to for the first time get a first closeup shot of ‘the little red spot, recently formed.
“This is an unprecedented opportunity,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in an interview with Discovery News. “It’s never been done on a giant planet before.”
Discovery News writes about the fascination for Jupiter, which revolves around it’s icy moons, powerful magnetic field and turbulent atmosphere. A previous mission, ‘Galileo’ who was only able to transmit limited data, did show evidence of an ocean on the third largest moon, Callisto, under it’s ice covered crust.
This mission will also include instrument training on Jupiter’s other moons, Io, Europa and Ganymede. A faulty main antenna, limited the data Galileo relayed back to Earth. That mission ended in 2003. It is expected New Horizon’s high-speed communications system will relay detailed information about the giant moons. It is known, Io has active volcanoes and Europa is thought to have an underground as well as maybe a life bearing sea.
“The probe, which will use Jupiter’s gravity field to slingshot itself onward to Pluto, also is scheduled to make a long trek down the length of Jupiter’s magnetic tail, which extends for tens of millions of miles beyond the planet. The tail stems from Jupiter’s vast and dynamic magnetic field, which is buffeted and shaped by the high-speed river of charged particles constantly flowing from the Sun.”
