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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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On 4 July, NASA intends to finish a job that started with the agency’s Galileo mission 21 years ago. At 8:18 p.m. Pacific time, the Juno spacecraft will ignite its main engine for 35 minutes and nudge itself into orbit around Jupiter. If all goes well, it will eventually slip into an even tighter path that whizzes as close as 4,200 kilometres above the planet’s roiling cloud-tops — while dodging as much of the lethal radiation in the planet’s belts as possible.
The US$1.1-billion mission, which launched in 2011, will be the first to visit the Solar System’s biggest planet since NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1995. Picking up where Galileo left off, Juno is designed to answer basic questions about Jupiter, including what its water content is, whether it has a core and what is happening at its rarely seen poles (see ‘Mission to Jupiter’).
Exploration of Jupiter’s interior should reveal more about the formidable atmospheric convection that powers the planet, says Paul Steffes, an electrical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Steffes and his colleagues have run a series of laboratory experiments to simulate what different layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere might look like: from near the cloud-tops, where experimental temperatures are –100 °Cto deeper in the planet, where they rise to more than 300 °C.
