Jupiter’s magnetospheric plasma torus
My penultimate week here at LASP has been the most interesting so far. With Martian conjunction starting next Tuesday, and Juno’s flyover of the Jupiter’s Great Red Spot on Monday, there has certainly been a lot going on here. I spent the first few days of the week working with the MAVEN team, making sure everything was prepared for the last contact with the spacecraft on Tuesday, making sure that all of the preprogrammed commands were correctly sequenced for the 3 weeks that MAVEN will be unable to receive new ones from Earth.
The Radio Telescope observation station
On Thursday, I set it up during the day to observe the Sun, and hopefully pick up any solar activity that might have been happening at the time. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe that the telescope picked up the peak of a solar radio burst that happened at around 18:00 UTC, or noon local time. On Friday and Saturday, I set the telescope up at night to try to record evidence of Jupiter’s electromagnetic storms caused by its closest moon, Io. The reason Io causes these storms is because its volcanoes eject over 2,000 kilograms of material into orbit around Jupiter every second. That material is then ionized by Jupiter’s magnetosphere and intense radiation belts. These charged particles then emit radiation, mainly in the radio wavelengths, which can then be picked up by receivers on Earth. I will include more information about the results of the observations on Friday and Saturday in my post next week.
What I believe is the peak of a solar radio burst picked up by our radio telescope
Holy cow! Could you say that again for someone that does not have your insight and smarts? Keep it simple for us old folks that still use a flip phone….
That is very interesting stuff!