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Today is the 400th Anniversary of Galileo Discovering Ganymede



 
 
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  #1  
Old January 22nd 10, 11:28 PM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,alt.astronomy
Eric Chomko[_2_]
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Posts: 2,853
Default Today is the 400th Anniversary of Galileo Discovering Ganymede

On Jan 19, 9:13*pm, Bill Owen wrote:
Eric Chomko wrote:
The most interesting use of the Jovian moons was Roemer trying to
guess the speed
of light.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8...on_of_the_spee...


Or the timing of eclipses as a method of determining longitude. *Jay
Lieske, before his retirement from JPL, found a veritable treasure trove
of 17th and 18th century eclipse observations, which helped constrain
the mean motion of the satellites before Galileo (the spacecraft) did it
far better.


After the antenna glitch on Galileo it is encouraging to read about
something it did well.


http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1986A%...6AS...63..143L

-- Bill Owen


  #2  
Old January 23rd 10, 02:05 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,alt.astronomy
Bill Owen
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Posts: 154
Default Today is the 400th Anniversary of Galileo Discovering Ganymede

Eric Chomko wrote:
On Jan 19, 9:13 pm, Bill Owen wrote:
Eric Chomko wrote:
The most interesting use of the Jovian moons was Roemer trying to
guess the speed
of light.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8...on_of_the_spee...

Or the timing of eclipses as a method of determining longitude. Jay
Lieske, before his retirement from JPL, found a veritable treasure trove
of 17th and 18th century eclipse observations, which helped constrain
the mean motion of the satellites before Galileo (the spacecraft) did it
far better.


After the antenna glitch on Galileo it is encouraging to read about
something it did well.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1986A%...6AS...63..143L

-- Bill Owen



Thanks, Eric. The four Galileans are massive enough that their
gravitational signature showed up easily in the Doppler pretty much all
the time we were in orbit -- not just during flybys -- this meant that
the radio tracking data served so well to pin down Galileo's trajectory
that we could forgo optical navigation imaging after the first five or
six revolutions.

Galileo managed to get a lot done very well, despite the antenna glitch
and the resulting huge hit to the data volume. The satellite science
was just fine, the fields and particles stuff was OK -- the big loser
was atmospheric science, which was heavy on imaging. They got a lot of
that back during Cassini's flyby, and presumably even more from New
Horizons.

-- Bill
  #3  
Old January 23rd 10, 06:20 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,alt.astronomy
Pat Flannery
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Posts: 18,465
Default Today is the 400th Anniversary of Galileo Discovering Ganymede

Bill Owen wrote:

Galileo managed to get a lot done very well, despite the antenna glitch
and the resulting huge hit to the data volume. The satellite science
was just fine, the fields and particles stuff was OK -- the big loser
was atmospheric science, which was heavy on imaging. They got a lot of
that back during Cassini's flyby, and presumably even more from New
Horizons.


Toward the end of its mission Galileo got great close-up shots of Io's
volcanoes where you could see the lava glowing down inside the craters;
http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~idh/apod/ap020327.html
http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/p...io_volcano.jpg
Did they ever figure out why the drop probe gave such unexpected results
during its descent into the clouds? Did it come down in a boundary
between two cloud belts as was speculated at the time?

Pat
 




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