Exploration of the gas giants

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Webb's First Raw Saturn Images Have Arrived
The NIRCam images haven't been processed yet, so they may not look like the Webb images you've previously seen, but they're amazing even raw.
https://www.extremetech.com/science/web ... ve-arrived

By Ryan Whitwam June 27, 2023

We live in interesting times, which are often more tragic than boring ones. It's not all gloom and doom—we live at a time when the James Webb Space Telescope has just come online, and it could explore distant corners of the cosmos for another 20 years. NASA has also used the telescope to peer at nearer objects like Jupiter. Now, it's Saturn's turn, and you can get a preview of Webb's Saturn photospread right now.

The Webb Telescope is currently hovering in space out past the orbit of the moon at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, instead of in low Earth orbit like Hubble. Webb needed to be all the way out there to protect its sensitive infrared instruments from heat. Since it captures infrared data with its primary Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument, the data has to be processed to make it more accurate to the human eye.

The JWST Feed website isn't associated with NASA or any other aerospace agency. It exists solely to publish every scrap of data received by Webb as soon as it's released. Right now, it's pumping out new views of Saturn. The images haven't been processed yet, but they look incredible—this is what Webb sees when it looks at the ringed planet.

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SHIT! Nasa sucking dick.

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This isn't news from what I found

https://spacenews.com/nasa-delays-drago ... by-a-year/

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NASA's Juno is getting ever closer to Jupiter's moon Io
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-nasa-juno ... -moon.html

by Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The spinning, solar-powered spacecraft will take another look of the fiery Jovian moon on July 30.

When NASA's Juno mission flies by Jupiter's fiery moon Io on Sunday, July 30, the spacecraft will be making its closest approach yet, coming within 13,700 miles (22,000 kilometers) of it. Data collected by the Italian-built JIRAM (Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper) and other science instruments is expected to provide a wealth of information on the hundreds of erupting volcanoes pouring out molten lava and sulfurous gases all over the volcano-festooned moon.

"While JIRAM was designed to look at Jupiter's polar aurora, its capability to identify heat sources is proving to be indispensable in our hunt for active volcanos on Io," said Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

"As we get closer with each flyby, JIRAM and other instruments aboard Juno add to our library of data on the moon, allowing us to not only better resolve surface features but understand how they change over time."

Launched in 2011, the spinning, solar-powered spacecraft has been studying the Jovian system since 2016 and will begin the third year of its extended mission on July 31.

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Hundred-year storms? That's how long they last on Saturn
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-hundred-y ... aturn.html
by Robert Sanders, University of California - Berkele

The largest storm in the solar system, a 10,000-mile-wide anticyclone called the Great Red Spot, has decorated Jupiter's surface for hundreds of years.

A new study now shows that Saturn—though much blander and less colorful than Jupiter—also has long-lasting megastorms with impacts deep in the atmosphere that persist for centuries.

The study was conducted by astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who looked at radio emissions from the planet, which come from below the surface, and found long-term disruptions in the distribution of ammonia gas.

The study was published today in the journal Science Advances.

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Something Just Smacked Into Jupiter and Amateur Astronomers Captured It
Tom Hale
September 1, 2023

Introduction:

(IFL Science) A celestial object recently smashed into Jupiter, the undisputed king of the planets, releasing a short but sharp flash of energy. While objects frequently collide with Jupiter – much more so than any other planet in the Solar System – it’s pretty exceptional for scientists to document the crash in action. Remarkably, this latest collision was accidentally captured by an amateur astronomer.

The impact was first spotted by the Okinawa-based astronomical observation projects OASES and PONCOTS at 1:45 am Japan Standard Time on August 29 (4:45 pm UTC, August 28). In a social media post, they raised the alarm and put out a message saying: “If you were observing Jupiter around the same time, please check the shooting data again, and if you find a flash, please report it on TL or DM this account!”

Shortly after, the MASA Planetary Log replied with some imagery showing the dramatic collision.

"When I woke up in the morning and opened X (Twitter), I saw information that a flash had been observed on the surface of Jupiter. That night, when I checked the video of the corresponding time, I saw a flash,” the person behind the MASA Planetary Log account told Space.com.

https://www.iflscience.com/something-ju ... -it-70524

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James Webb Space Telescope Finds Clues to Europa's Hidden Ocean
There's more to the Jovian moon than meets the eye.
By Jessica Hall September 22, 2023

https://www.extremetech.com/science/jam ... dden-ocean
The smallest of the Galilean moons, Jupiter's moon Europa is covered pole to pole in a sheet of water ice 10 miles thick. Below the rime of ice that glazes the planet, scientists are all but certain that Europa has a hidden ocean of liquid water, so deep that it makes the Mariana Trench look like a surface scratch. NASA's forthcoming Europa Clipper probe is planned to visit the Jovian moon in 2030 or thereabouts, and that data would be invaluable. But between now and then, scientists have a secret weapon: the James Webb Space Telescope. While the JWST excels at deep-field images, it can also pull its focus inward to look at targets within our solar system, and do fine-grained spectral analysis of its target.

This week, two papers appeared in Science from two independent teams that used data from their own Webb telescope time to arrive at the same conclusion. Both teams zeroed in on a bright spot on Europa called Tara Regio, where the ice is relatively very young and the crust so thoroughly disrupted that scientists call it "chaos terrain." There, they found evidence of carbon—specifically, carbon dioxide ice, otherwise scarce on Europa's surface. This suggests that it was dredged up from below. It could be from the churning ice, shattered and thrown around by the titanic tidal forces of Jupiter itself. Or, it could have been uncovered when an impact smashed the crust, like when an asteroid hits Jupiter and leaves a telltale "splash" of subsurface chemicals. But in either case, it's strong evidence for the hidden ocean below Europa's obscuring ice.