NASA is extending Mars and Jupiter missions, citing notable success

[Thaivisa Web Content Team 1,534]

Citing discoveries that have "produced exceptional science," NASA has decided to add several years to two of its planetary science missions: the Jupiter Juno mission and the Mars InSight lander.

 

After a lengthy review process, which can be found here, the space agency concluded that both missions have "increased our understanding of our solar system, as well as spurred new sets of diverse questions."

 

"The Senior Review has validated that these two planetary science missions are likely to continue to bring new discoveries, and produce new questions about our solar system," said Lori Glaze, director of the planetary science division, in a statement.

 

"I thank the members of the Senior Review panel for their comprehensive analysis and thank the mission teams as well, who will now continue to provide exciting opportunities to refine our understanding of the dynamic science of Jupiter and Mars."

 

Juno has made a number of discoveries about Jupiter, including capturing remarkable, never-before-seen images, as well as a "snow-white" oval storm.

 

The Juno mission launched in 2011 and was scheduled to stop functioning in July 2021, but will now continue until September 2025 or the end of its life, whichever comes first. Not only will Juno continue to observe the gas giant, but it will also look at the planet's rings and its moons, including "close flybys" of Ganymede, Europa, and Io. 

 

Europa, the sixth-largest moon in the Solar System, is home to an ocean that "could be habitable," researchers have said previously. In August 2019, NASA confirmed it would send a mission to Europa to further explore the celestial body.

 

At a cost of $828 million, the InSight lander became the space agency’s first probe to reach the Red Planet in six years, following the August 2012 landing of the Curiosity Rover.

 

The InSight lander mission will be extended at least through December 2022. It will continue its work gathering seismic and weather data, as well conducting research using its heat probe.

 

The InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission, which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has provided scientists with a wealth of stunning images and discoveries since landing safely on the Red Planet in November 2018 after "seven minutes of terror."

 

The lander had originally been scheduled to blast off in March 2016, but NASA suspended its launch preparations when a vacuum leak was found in the craft’s prime science instrument.

 

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[TKDfella 2,087]

We are living in a fantastic age of scientific discovery. The Curiosity Mars Rover has now spent 3000 days on the surface and still going.

[Muhendis 862]

22 hours ago, Thaivisa Web Content Team said:

Europa, the sixth-largest moon in the Solar System, is home to an ocean that "could be habitable,"

Distance from the sun: On average, Europa's distance from the sun is about 485 million miles (or 780 million kilometers).

Distance from Jupiter: Europa is Jupiter's sixth satellite. Its orbital distance from Jupiter is 414,000 miles (670,900 km). It takes Europa three and a half Earth-days to orbit Jupiter. Europa is tidally locked, so the same side faces Jupiter at all times.

Size: Europa is 1,900 miles (3,100 km) in diameter, making it smaller than Earth's moon, but larger than Pluto. It is the smallest of the Galilean moons.

Temperature: Europa's surface temperature at the equator never rises above minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 160 degrees Celsius). At the poles of the moon, the temperature never rises above minus 370 F (minus 220 C).

Not habitable for me. The "ocean", at those surface temperatures is probably solid ice.

[Muhendis 862]

4 minutes ago, TKDfella said:

The Curiosity Mars Rover has now spent 3000 days on the surface and still going.

I could do with some batteries like that for my solar power.

[elgenon 1,438]

Maybe they are able to spend more time and money on these amazing things as private companies are taking over more mundane things.

[DB58 143]

9 hours ago, Muhendis said:

Distance from the sun: On average, Europa's distance from the sun is about 485 million miles (or 780 million kilometers).

Distance from Jupiter: Europa is Jupiter's sixth satellite. Its orbital distance from Jupiter is 414,000 miles (670,900 km). It takes Europa three and a half Earth-days to orbit Jupiter. Europa is tidally locked, so the same side faces Jupiter at all times.

Size: Europa is 1,900 miles (3,100 km) in diameter, making it smaller than Earth's moon, but larger than Pluto. It is the smallest of the Galilean moons.

Temperature: Europa's surface temperature at the equator never rises above minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 160 degrees Celsius). At the poles of the moon, the temperature never rises above minus 370 F (minus 220 C).

Not habitable for me. The "ocean", at those surface temperatures is probably solid ice.

The possibility of supporting life is in the subsurface ocean. 
https://phys.org/news/2020-06-ocean-jupiter-moon-europa-habitable.html

[billsmart 821]

I'm absolutely opposed to any of these types of activities. We should not be spending our time and resources on things like this until we clean up our own planet. Right now, any efforts to spread the humans to other worlds should not be called "colonizing," it should be called "metastasizing." 

[billsmart 821]

22 hours ago, TKDfella said:

We are living in a fantastic age of scientific discovery. The Curiosity Mars Rover has now spent 3000 days on the surface and still going.

That's just an advanced form of littering, IMO. 

[crobe 781]

11 minutes ago, billsmart said:

I'm absolutely opposed to any of these types of activities. We should not be spending our time and resources on things like this until we clean up our own planet. Right now, any efforts to spread the humans to other worlds should not be called "colonizing," it should be called "metastasizing." 

You make the mistake of thinking that the two are mutually exclusive or that the spend on such things is a zero-sum game.

No-one in the scientific community is asking governments to divert money from ecology and the environment to spend on space research. Far from it, the vast majority of scientists and engineers working in the space domain are in favour, and actively working for, climate benefit and the long-term good of the planet, and because it is a highly educated industry there are very few "climate-deniers"

It is space research that has provided the technology and data that we need going forward - the fact that satellites need solar power and batteries has been a major input to the research and development of developing these technologies on ground and pushing the technology boundaries with new materials and processes.

We have had satellites in space now for the last 60 years monitoring the planet, including the temperature of the oceans, and it is this data that allows us to see the long-term trends and the effects.

New satellites are becoming more accurate and focusing on specific pollutants, like methane and CO2, and are now able to pinpoint sources of this pollution, even when those sources are deep within another country and not accessible to be monitored by any other means.

Even Thailand has new satellites for monitoring (THEOS-2) coming in-orbit in 2 years time, and may be able to show what exactly is happening with upstream dams in Laos and China that cannot be monitored any other way, but have a dramatic impact on the lives and livelihoods of people in Thailand living along the Mekong.

And as for exploring outer space, that is one of the things that drives people to enter the space business, either the brightest and best from the universities, or the "internet billionaires" who are all now investing in space technologies - not only for exploration but also for communications, remote sensing and science. 

 

[TKDfella 2,087]

Also Rolls Royce and the UK Space Agency are joining to do research on nuclear powered spacecraft. If successful, would probably halve the duration of such trips to Mars, Jupiter and beyond. Such research, and other forms of propulsion, will keep higher education at the 'cutting edge'.

[crobe 781]

1 hour ago, billsmart said:

I'm absolutely opposed to any of these types of activities. We should not be spending our time and resources on things like this until we clean up our own planet. Right now, any efforts to spread the humans to other worlds should not be called "colonizing," it should be called "metastasizing." 

Continued..

 

While I have some sympathy with your viewpoint about the human race pursuing the same sort of ecological damage on the Moon and Mars as it has on Earth - and there are plans in place from many countries including China to start trying to mine the moon, there is a way in which this can be of ecological benefit to the earth.

Our use of organics (hydrocarbons for fuel and plastics, coal for fuel etc.) could be drastically reduced in the next 30 years with more investment and government mandates on renewables, but there is still the issue of mineral mining. The mining of metals, whether they are industrial metals like iron and nickel, precious metals like gold and platinum, or rare earths such as Scandium or Yttrium which are used in mobile phones and increasingly sought after as we go into quantum computing, creates massive ecological damage and pollutes the community, as has been the case in Thailand. And it is still getting worse as we dig deeper and farther in the earth's crust.

 

But the Earth is not the only place where these metals are fund, if you imagine the crust of the earth split apart into thousands of pieces, this is the asteroid belt lying in between Mars and Jupiter. 

It is estimated that a single asteroid - 16 Psyche - contains more than $10,000 Quadrillion  (yes Quadrillion) worth of metals - that is more than the supply on Earth mined in 20 years and a value greater than the total of the worlds GDP. And that is only one of thousands of asteroids.

 

At the moment we do not have the technology to go straight to these asteroids, mine them, and safely bring the metals back, but the technologies being developed for colonizing the moon and Mars are essential stepping stones to  this end objective.

While it may be utopian to envisage Earth as a "garden planet" with no fossil fuels used and no mining - at least we are pursuing some concrete programs to eventually get to this point.

 

 

[StevieAus 1,103]

1 hour ago, crobe said:

Continued..

 

While I have some sympathy with your viewpoint about the human race pursuing the same sort of ecological damage on the Moon and Mars as it has on Earth - and there are plans in place from many countries including China to start trying to mine the moon, there is a way in which this can be of ecological benefit to the earth.

Our use of organics (hydrocarbons for fuel and plastics, coal for fuel etc.) could be drastically reduced in the next 30 years with more investment and government mandates on renewables, but there is still the issue of mineral mining. The mining of metals, whether they are industrial metals like iron and nickel, precious metals like gold and platinum, or rare earths such as Scandium or Yttrium which are used in mobile phones and increasingly sought after as we go into quantum computing, creates massive ecological damage and pollutes the community, as has been the case in Thailand. And it is still getting worse as we dig deeper and farther in the earth's crust.

 

But the Earth is not the only place where these metals are fund, if you imagine the crust of the earth split apart into thousands of pieces, this is the asteroid belt lying in between Mars and Jupiter. 

It is estimated that a single asteroid - 16 Psyche - contains more than $10,000 Quadrillion  (yes Quadrillion) worth of metals - that is more than the supply on Earth mined in 20 years and a value greater than the total of the worlds GDP. And that is only one of thousands of asteroids.

 

At the moment we do not have the technology to go straight to these asteroids, mine them, and safely bring the metals back, but the technologies being developed for colonizing the moon and Mars are essential stepping stones to  this end objective.

While it may be utopian to envisage Earth as a "garden planet" with no fossil fuels used and no mining - at least we are pursuing some concrete programs to eventually get to this point.

 

 

Excellent commentary if I may say in relation to both your posts.

There are many benefits for us existing earth dwellers that have arisen from the space exploration, I seem to think that silicon and teflon are a couple that spring to mind.

Thank goodness we are not all luddites.

[puipuitom 2,808]

13 hours ago, billsmart said:

I'm absolutely opposed to any of these types of activities. We should not be spending our time and resources on things like this until we clean up our own planet. Right now, any efforts to spread the humans to other worlds should not be called "colonizing," it should be called "metastasizing." 

When we would have said that when we started to experiment with electricity, we were still in the Steam Age.

[TKDfella 2,087]

On 1/14/2021 at 7:57 AM, billsmart said:

I'm absolutely opposed to any of these types of activities. We should not be spending our time and resources on things like this until we clean up our own planet. Right now, any efforts to spread the humans to other worlds should not be called "colonizing," it should be called "metastasizing." 

Scientists are people with a wide range of interests which in turn come from people with the same. Some people are just not interested or motivated in some topics while others are. One cannot simply divert expertise from say, someone interested in 'what's up there' to pollution control etc. The mind doesn't work that way. Or say for example, a mathematician might be great in supplying the equations for modelling this or that but put a microscope or telescope in their hand and they might get bored. While we have the diversity of thought and expertise, we should use it.

[billsmart 821]

4 hours ago, TKDfella said:

Scientists are people with a wide range of interests which in turn come from people with the same. Some people are just not interested or motivated in some topics while others are. One cannot simply divert expertise from say, someone interested in 'what's up there' to pollution control etc. The mind doesn't work that way. Or say for example, a mathematician might be great in supplying the equations for modelling this or that but put a microscope or telescope in their hand and they might get bored. While we have the diversity of thought and expertise, we should use it.

We are using our intellect, and that is what is resulting in the destruction of this planet.