The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has extended its Juno mission as the space agency plans to take explorers back to the moon and on to Mars. The satellite circling Jupiter since July 2016 has allegedly observed an FM radio signal that could have come from the Ganymede moon of Jupiter. Research indicates that no such detections had historically been collected from the most giant moon in our solar system with its own magnetic field.
Juno was flying through the polar area of Jupiter, where Ganymede was bound by magnetic field lines. That's when it crossed the origins of the radio, says ABC4.
Scientists claim the radio emission that the spacecraft detected for only five seconds when traveling at 50 kilometers per second, or 111,847 miles per hour, was possibly triggered by electrons.
Patrick Wiggins, one of NASA's Utah ambassadors, assured ABC4 that this isn't ET. More like a normal feature, it is. But Wiggins admits he does think life is out there, thus ruling out aliens. Yet professionals are also looking for confirmation to confirm it.
What are the targets of Juno?
The key purpose, released on August 5, 2011, is to consider the nature and development of Jupiter. Under its thick cloud cover, Jupiter protects the secrets of the fundamental processes and conditions that controlled our solar system's creation. Jupiter will also have crucial information to explain the celestial structures being found around other stars, as our main illustration of a giant planet," says NASA.
The project provided its first experimental findings on the quantity of water in the atmosphere of Jupiter in February 2019. The findings estimate that water accounts for 0.25 percent of the molecules in the atmosphere of Jupiter. That's about three times that of the Earth.
These are also the first results on the abundance of water by the gas giant after the Galileo project of the organization in 1995 indicated that Jupiter could be incredibly dry relative to the planet. The comparison also focused on the existence of its elements in Jupiter.
For decades, an exact calculation of the cumulative volume of water in the atmosphere of Jupiter has been on the wish lists of planetary scientists. According to experts, the number reflects a crucial missing piece of the mystery of our solar system's origin. The first planet to develop was Jupiter because it retains much of the gas and dust that has not been absorbed into the Sun, researchers claim.
The Juno spacecraft and its mission team found the inner composition, magnetic field and magnetosphere of Jupiter. It also discovered the atmospheric dynamics to be much more complicated than commonly believed by scientists.
Any new results touch on 'heat spots' that are far larger and broader than expected in the atmosphere. The implication is that the hot spots may not be remote deserts, but rather openings into a large region that may be cooler and drier than other Jupiter's atmosphere regions. High-resolution Juno data reveals that these Jovian hot spots are aligned with splits in the cloud deck of the earth, giving a peek into the deep atmosphere of Jupiter, NASA describes.
Task to widen inquiries
Recently, after an external analysis of their research productivity, NASA extended the task. The mission, extended to September 2025, will not only continue main Jupiter observations. It will also broaden its study into the broader Jovian system, including Jupiter rings and big moons, with targeted words and scheduled near flybys of the Ganymede, Europa, and Ioo moons.
An impartial evaluation group, composed of specialists from research, logistics, and project management perspectives, reported that Juno and another mission named InSight "generated excellent science," and suggested that both proceed with NASA.
The Juno Mission for Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio manages NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Juno is part of NASA's Modern Frontiers Initiative, operated by NASA's Scientific Project Directorate at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The spacecraft was designed by Lockheed Martin Space, Denver. Two devices, the Ka-band frequency translator (KaT) and the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper, were donated by the Italian Space Agency (ASI).
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