Jupiter (Planet) -- Photographs from space; Jupiter probes; Voyager Project
(_Range to Jupiter, 4.8 million kilometers_). At 5 a.m., at a distance
of 71 R_J, Voyager crossed the bow shock for the third time, catching up
with the contracting magnetosphere of the planet. About noon, at 66 R_J,
the spacecraft finally reached the boundary of the magnetosphere, called
the magnetopause. Herbert Bridge, the plasma instrument Principal
Investigator, noted that the solar wind pressure as monitored by Voyager
2, still between the Sun and Jupiter, had been for several days from two
to five times greater than its level during the Pioneer 10 and 11
encounters. Presumably, this high pressure was the cause of the
compressed state of the magnetosphere. However, in the previous few
hours the solar pressure had dropped, so Bridge anticipated that the
Jovian magnetosphere might soon inflate and expand outward.
[Illustration: The southern hemisphere of Jupiter presents a
tremendous diversity of atmospheric structure and motion. The Great
Red Spot rotates counterclockwise in about six days; above and below
it high-speed jet streams flow to the right and the left, while a
complex, dynamic cloud pattern develops in its wake. This picture
was taken on February 25, when Voyager 1 was 9 million kilometers
from the planet. [P-21151C]]
Fred Scarf intrigued the press with a tape of the sounds made by
high-energy protons coming upstream from Jupiter. The plasma wave
instrument had recorded the noise of the protons, mixed with the noise
of the spacecraft itself, producing sound effects that sounded somewhat
like a mixture of singing whales, a Nor’easter, and the Daytona 500.
At the press briefing, interest in the imaging results began to shift
from Jupiter toward the satellites. Pictures of each of the four big
Galilean moons revealed bright and dark features as small as about 200
kilometers across. Unfortunately, this resolution is not enough to be
diagnostic—the spots cannot be interpreted in terms of recognizable
geological features, such as mountains or craters. Today one could only
speculate, but tomorrow or the next day the answers would begin to come
in. Deputy Imaging Team Leader Larry Soderblom conveyed his excitement
through a metaphor that would be repeated many times during the next
week: “We’re beginning a stage in this mission which represents, I
think, one of the most exciting points in man’s scientific exploration
of the solar system—in the next few days, we’ll explore four new
worlds,” seeing in a few days’ time what it took us centuries to learn
about other worlds in our solar system. In terms of our experience with
the exploration of Mars, “it is about 1700 AD this morning, tomorrow it
will be about 1800, and it will be about 1976 [the year of Viking] by
Tuesday evening.”
Friday, March 2.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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