Jupiter odyssey

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun [Music] the mass of Jupiter is twice that of all other planets in the solar system combined I'm Mary Ross Director space programs at NASA's Lewis Research Center in Cleveland Ohio I'm your host for this ninth program of the thirteen part series called journey through the solar system [Music] during this program you'll see the NASA film titled Jupiter Odyssey it's about the Pioneer 10 spacecraft launched by the Lewis managed Atlas centaur the probe had the newest approach to the planet on December 3rd 1973 today we have a clearer picture of Jupiter and its moons than is presented in the upcoming film the reason the more advanced Voyager spacecraft later flew by the planet we will look at the Voyager project and another program and learn new details such as the current count of 14 moons this programs older film reports that there are twelve moons now let's see that movie which shows our first good look at Jupiter in 1973 [Music] they used to be called heavenly bodies our local star prime mover the earthly environment father of all life our almost twin satellite phasing predictably through the night small wonder both were regarded as gods by the ancients today we know the moon as a place now picture if you will a fantastic world we're not one but twelve moons crisscross the sky four of them moving backwards for others the size of small planets this is Jupiter largest member by far the sons family monarch of the outer planets a thousand times the size of Earth in fact twice as large as all the other planets combined it is nearly a small star a second son Jupiter named for the Roman god of gods to our eyes it reveals only its dazzling cloud tops rivers of wild color and its trademark the Great Red Spot a perpetual storm of unknown origin on Jupiter day and night are each less than five earth hours long and a man would weighed 500 pounds in early 1972 mankind launched pioneer 10 the first mission to the outer planets the first to venture out beyond the orbit of Mars out through the Jupiter system and eventually out of our solar system completely [Music] the planets of our solar system come in two varieties the inner four including earth the heavy rocky cinders where the fifth should be there's only a band of debris the asteroid belt beyond ride the enormous outer for the mysterious gas giants astronomers have studied them since the time of Galileo it was he who discovered Jupiter's four large moons with his newly perfected telescope beautiful ring Saturn third of the gas giants Uranus rotating on its side it circles the Sun like a falling gyroscope and finally Neptune one of Neptune's moons and one moon belonging to Uranus were discovered by this modern Galileo the late dr. Gerard Kuiper of the University of Arizona his backyard in Tucson has flowers a swimming pool and a private Observatory here at Catalina peak his studies have produced some of the most outstanding color photographs ever made of Jupiter from the Earth's surface this is saw that the typical photograph which shows the rat spot of the planets which is the most prominent feature this back as part here is the satellite shadow is the satellite eel which is the nearest of the four large satellites of the planets the satellite that salvaged here and doesn't show very well contrasted to the planet itself now the first thing you see is first of course that the disk of the planet is elliptical and up is because of its rapid rotation which is roughly 10 hours the period is roughly 10 hours the diameter of this planet is about 10 times the diameter of the earth so there's a gigantic planet the total mass is not however a thousand times the volume is a thousand times with the mass is only about 300 times that of the earth so the mean density of this planet is somewhat like the Sun and office because of this launching the compost of hydrogen so the composition of this planet is very very different from the earth then very similar in fact to the Sun except the temperature of course is much lower than the Sun and because the temperature is low you get a chemistry here which is totally different from the Sun so you have all these interesting colors here and what we have been doing in recent years is to try to understand both the motions of all these clouds and their composition our Odyssey to the outer planets begins here at Cape Kennedy a good omen under a mock Jupiter sunrise the ungainly pregnant guppy delivers a special cargo [Applause] the Jupiter pioneers were built by TRW systems of Redondo Beach California under contract to NASA's Ames Research Center the project involves some 25 million man-hours of meticulous work by the government industry university pioneer team each marvelously compact and reliable spacecraft weighs less than 600 pounds including some 65 pounds of scientific instruments the 11 onboard sensors include five radiation and charge particle detectors one magnetometer and three light measuring devices one for the visible spectrum and one for either end of the visible range the infrared and the ultraviolet there's also an experiment to look for asteroids and one to measure the number of times pioneer is struck by space dust all of these devices together use less electricity than 125 watt bulb that's energy conservation to other investigations dig out new information about the Jupiter system from ground cracking data the question arises what can 65 pounds of spaceborne instruments tell us that Earth's finest facilities can't for example the famous monk Palomar telescope with its 17 foot diameter glass eye [Music] a scientist who uses both pioneer and Palomar is dr. gido moon of Caltech we have used the 200-inch telescope extensively for planetary observations this is the largest operating telescope that has ever been built with this telescope the planet Jupiter appears of the size of a 50-cent piece the pioneer incorrect experiment will provide a map of the heat emitted by the planet with a three inch telescope but at the distance of closest approach the planet will cover one-fifth of the sky and this is the advantage that we get from the strange telescope to the down base with large telescopes here we need to measure the quantity of heat accurately is the only material adji all the motion of the clouds that we see in Jupiter is governed by the amount of heat coming from the inside and we hope that there will understanding of the materiality of Jupiter will in fact provide us with the very way to handle our weather problems the second day of March 1972 pioneer 10 waits for launch atop a new three-stage version of the Atlas centaur rocket [Music] thirteen months later a sister spacecraft pioneer 11 left the band on its long and chauncey voyage to Jupiter and Saturn [Music] it's not easy to break out of the solar system it requires enough speed to defeat the sun's battery as well as Earth's gravity pioneer streaks away faster than any previous spacecraft gulping distance at a million miles a day passing the moon in just 11 hours still Jupiter is nearly two years away on the way out past Mars the experiments are tested and calibrated their data add to mankind's understanding of the interplanetary climate of space [Music] the asteroid belt as some had imagined it before pioneer 10 it was pictured as a region where great boulders grind together creating a 40,000 mile per hour sandstone if so it might have represented a perpetual barrier through outer planet flights in fact the pioneers found very little space dust in the asteroid belt true there are several thousand asteroids some as big as Texas but they should offer no menace to navigation pioneer gets its electricity from small onboard atomic heat sources at a half billion miles the Sun is too weak to power solar cells the spacecraft spins five times a minute for stabilization on ground command small thrusters fire to maintain the spin rate and to keep the large dish antenna precisely pointed at the receding rhythm this radio link is a two-way street a constant stream of information flows back about the help of the Pioneer and its scientific observations pioneer is managed and controlled from Ames Research Center located at Mountain View California near San Francisco the nerve center is in this building pioneer project manager Charles F Hall it's we're in the Mission Control area for pioneer 10 and behind us is the Mission Control Room right now the commands the spacecraft merely to change the attitude of one of the instruments the operating mode so that we can look on Jupiter the interesting feature here is that the round-trip flight time the time to get a message from here up to the spacecraft and then to get a return answer is an hour and a half so our people in there have to be used to this delay when they start planning the pioneers are run by men who send commands from earth not by automatic systems on board this cuts complexity and costs during encounter it's busy here for example to command just the electronic camera that makes pictures of people earlier people transmitted some 15-thousand commands in just two months in response to these commands the camera scans Jupiter's turbulent cloud tops as pioneer spins toured in color because the spacecraft is moving at up to 80 thousand miles per hour and because Jupiter is rotating at 22,000 miles per hour the scans do not immediately form a pretty picture they must be decoded and corrected for Distortion [Music] first the scans are built up line by line on a television display this gives a quick look at the operation of the system and a tantalizing hint to the spectacular pictures buried in the raw data after the first stage of prettying up Jupiter's first close-up portrait emergency late November 1973 20 months after launch pioneer 10 closes in on Jupiter each hour brings the planet 20,000 miles closer what lies below those inscrutable cloud tops could there be life in this Maelstrom where pressures may reach two hundred thousand times Earth's there are scientists who think that the answer might be yes but deep in this raging atmosphere of ammonia Marsh gas and helium the self-replicating spark may have been struck one believer is dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University Jupiter has an atmosphere rich in hydrogen and it's compound is the same kind of atmosphere that the earth had at the time of the origin of life so we think that the building blocks of life at least earthly life are being produced on Jupiter today raining down from the skies like like manna from heaven and Jupiter may be a vast planetary laboratory in the chemistry of the origin of life that's been working for about five billion years it's by no means out of the question that there are forms of life in the clouds of Jupiter and indeed if you viewed the solar system from afar I think you could make an argument that life on Jupiter was more likely than life anywhere else including on the earth dr. Sagan also provided for pioneer the famous picture postcard to extraterrestrial life but in a remote contingency that there are interstellar spacefaring societies which might someday pick up this derelict - no longer radioing we thought we would put a message on it to indicate a little bit of where we are when we are and who we are we think that the information on where we are and when we are indicated in this part of the message by the configuration of certain cosmic objects called pulsars will be completely obvious to any society capable of traveling between the stars these two objects will be more mysterious because it is unlikely that there will be Ewing anywhere else even though there may be other creatures elsewhere and the plaque has served a very useful purpose in making us think about what sort of impression we might wish to give to the cosmos each morning the key scientific investigators and the key spacecraft personnel meet in the office of pioneer project manager Charlie hall for a stand-up meeting me why not a sit-down meeting because says charlie people don't talk so long when their feet get tired the contrast is a bit over I have the impression that it is all I really I don't know for sure that is all in the yeah with such accuracy but just grossly whether we can trust the angles on the only way to say anything because I don't know well I could get to say two hundred and fifty degrees or something like that system three which is not far from what the radiostar MERS Benford we have three sets of accurate observations with the IPP this week since the last precession manoeuvre what we're seeing here is that in both for both electrons and protons we're seeing in first approximation an in phase change December 2nd of 1973 tomorrow pioneer will make its closest pass of Jupiter when this fantastic world will fill 1/5 of the sky today pioneer is being cooked by incredibly severe radiation yet everything continues to work perfectly this spectacular picture shows the shadow of the satellite aisle just as dr. Kuiper's ground-based photo day but from this distance new details in the cloud bands become evident huge coiling storm areas larger than the earth since launch Pioneer has been slowing down now the pool of Jupiter's gravity speeds it up to a fantastic eighty-two thousand miles per hour in effect this crack the width left turn gives pioneer another rocket stage to fling it out of the solar system unexpectedly the space dust count soars a hundred times as many hits Jupiter's gravity may act as a cosmic vacuum cleaner December 3rd pioneer sweeps to within 81 thousand miles of the cloud tops now things happen fast 15 minutes after closest approach the spacecraft is targeted to pass out of sight behind the orange moon aisle for a critical two minutes this ultra precise maneuver will use radio effects to reveal new information about IO if the signal can be picked up again on the other side and if pioneer will obey commands again back at Mission Control there's a maternity hospital atmosphere they won't know what happened in space until 45 minutes later the speed of light is much too slow for the anxious parents [Music] he wondered [Applause] we missed the EEO occupation by one second we just sort of kidding I'm telling you you have to go through the clip into the right time when the EEO goes in front of you we're at three Jupiter radii way vo 60 of iterator you better get all the string lined up and we missed apply a second next time we'll do better an hour later pioneer passes out of sight of both Earth and Sun this time behind Jupiter the spacecraft is collecting its worst radiation exposure tension is even greater this time and so is really now pioneer views a sight never before seen by men but Crescent Jupiter we can see only its full phase like a full moon these lighting angles give scientists new information on the television system the images rapidly become smaller now several consecutive pictures can be stored on the tube at once thanks to energy literally stolen from Jupiter pioneer 10 departs more than twice as fast as it arrived [Music] early this morning now the world wants to know what have we learned but scientists readily admit to newsmen that for each question answered a hundred new ones have been raised to different phenomenon going on project scientist dr. John Boyer points approximately 44 Jovian radii we had the indication of very strange plasma distribution we're taking back with us to our laboratories data which essentially are puzzling to us and will take a long time to work out some points are clear the whole Jupiter system is heavier than we thought by about the weight of two-thirds moon's most important finding today IO has a thin atmosphere thus Jupiter's four large moons probably all have atmospheres seeing relatively abrupt decreases in the field magnitude too much lower values a compass on Jupiter would point to the South Pole instead of the north the infrared experiment successfully mapped Jupiter's heat in fine detail the planet gives off more than twice as much heat as it receives from the Sun why possibly it's enormous gravity makes it contract like a slow-motion star the white belts are cooler and therefore higher bands of clouds stretched around basically darker colored material below also the night side and the day side appear the same temperature discoveries like these flash out to the world to experimenters some of the most interesting findings concerned Jupiter's radiation belts and magnetic field pioneer first broke into the magnetic field and incredible four million miles in front of the planet because of the pressure of the solar wind this field spins out much farther behind Jupiter closer in pioneer indicates that Jupiter's intense radiation belts wobble up and down around a magnetic Center some 10,000 miles from the center of the planet in brief Jupiter is much different from Earth and much more complex than researchers imagine however pioneer proved that a spacecraft could survive the radiation after encounter the data tapes for the imaging experiment go to the University of Arizona for computer enhancement in a meticulous process millions of data points are juggled up and down the scale and what emerges is a portrait of Jupiter to challenge the most imaginative artist the Pioneers first to brave this land of giants first to fly forever among the lonely and endless stars of our galaxy carry mankind's message we're on our way theory holds that Jupiter is sended and so far from the Sun that the huge planet retains most of the material from which it was formed about 4 and 1/2 billion years ago scientists think that beneath the clouds Jupiter is an ocean of mostly liquid hydrogen theory says that above the ocean is a 600 mile high mostly hydrogen atmosphere Jovian clouds also contain water ammonia and methane between very cold cloud tops and the very hot interior are probably regions of earth normal temperatures Jupiter is lightning could be a catalyst in the formation of organic compounds in these regions during our next program Jupiter a clearer picture we will see how NASA plans to send the Galileo mission to Jupiter in 1986 Galileo launched from a shuttle by the Lewis managed centaur will orbit the planet and send a probe into the clouds we will also see the very sharp pictures which voyagers showed us of Jupiter and its moons this is Larry Ross saying goodbye from NASA's Lewis Research Center in Cleveland [Music]