Twilight and Luna discuss orbital mechanics and NASA’s Juno mission. Pinkie Pie brings pizza. · 5:30pm Jul 9th, 2016
Source: Jupiter (NASA), Luna, Twilight.
“How many moons does Jupiter have?” asked Twilight.
“Sixty-six,” said Luna, “or is it sixty-seven? That’s just the known natural satellites. There’s probably some more I haven’t met yet. Anyway it’s a huge family.” She winced. “Can you imagine growing up with that many brothers and sisters? With all the relationships strained by strong tidal forces, orbital resonances, and sibling rivalry...”
“And now they have a new adopted family member thanks to NASA,” said Twilight. “The NASA team successfully moved the Juno space probe into orbit around Jupiter. That sounds like quite a tricky bit of moon raising.”
“Indeed,” agreed Luna. “Far more complicated than anything we did in Twilight’s Sputnik. To achieve this, they had to first launch it into a heliocentric orbit, let it move further from sun, then undertake a series of deep space manoeuvres, send it back to the earth to pick up angular momentum before moving out to Jupiter, then firing rockets to slow it down to be captured by the giant planet and put it into a polar orbit. The timing is critical as they could not afford to waste fuel.”
“And soon the science part of the mission can begin,” said Twilight with a broad grin. “It’s such a fascinating planet. Somehow the spinning liquid metallic hydrogen in the interior makes a strong magnetic field, which then directs charged particles into intense radiation belts above the clouds, storms, and super-fast winds in the atmosphere. Juno will explore all this. And with a better understanding of its interior, we will be able to better understand the origin of this planet and its role in shaping the solar system.”
The door burst open and Pinkie bounced in, balancing a greater number of pizza platters on her head than the laws of physics would reasonably allow.
“Surprise! It’s time for the Higgs Boson Pizza Party.”
“What?” said Twilight and Luna together.
“While you two have been nerding out about orbital mechanics and Jupiter, you missed the other super-exciting science news story of the week. It’s the Higgs’s fourth birthday—at least it’s the fourth anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs Boson—in a way the Higgs Boson has been around since the spontaneous symmetry breaking after the big bang—and individual Higgs Bosons only live for a tiny fraction of an attosecond. But still it’s a birthday—so we have to celebrate it with a special Higgs Boson Pizza Party! CERN have published the recipe.”
Source: Pinkie Pie, Pizza
See also:
Twilight and Luna discuss the Rosetta mission and Luna makes a comet
What the hay is the Higgs Boson?
I'm gonna have to make that pizza, otherwise the value of my nerd cred might dip even lower than the pound hur hur politics.
I love this line.
Luna must have a great perspective on astronomical relations...
Hmm, you realise that once you make the Higgs Boson Pizza, the only way to improve on that, is to E8 it
Im just so sad that theyre sending out probes where they are so desperate to get what little information they can, they add more instruments instead of fuel, cutting observation times from years to months, meaning theres no chance of coherent consecutive overlapping observations.
That, and those solar panels are huge, but the communications dish is tiny and fixed, how much power, fuel, ion drive time and communication rate could you be looking at if that outer panel radius was a basic solar sail concentrator dish reflector? I mean, pull the 2 kW drive off DS1 and use it as the emitter for the traveling wave transmission amplifier? The stochastic modulation algorithms were derived from a free running version which gives far better bandwidth per power.
Solar power at jupiter. Thats going to make autonomous mining in the asteroid belt or even Trojans an awful lot easier. Give out at jupiter, Ice is a building material.
I'm so glad I followed you
Orbital mechanics are second best mechanics, proceeded only by Lagrangian
4080300
An oft-repeated comment on this mission: Galileo named Jupiter's moons after his mistresses. NASA named their probe after his wife. An astronomy/mythology joke 400 years in the making.
Io is so mad that she erupts in anger:
Tidal friction would rapidly circularize the orbits of the Galilean Moons if it would not be for interactions between the moons:
A motionless tidal bulge of constant height on a tidally locked moon exerts no friction. Part of the tidal heating is from the tidal bulges from the moons moving through each other. The torques from the moons decircularize the orbits of each other, thus causing the tidal bulge of Jupiter to librate and change height.