Photograph courtesy of NASA / ESA/ Reuters
Today, July 4, NASA scientists will begin listening for a radio signal, letting them know the Juno Probe has begun orbiting around Jupiter.
They are studying activity at its poles to find out how the auroras respond to changes in the solar wind. According to the European Space Agency, Jupiter’s auroras cover areas larger than the entire Earth, are hundreds of times more energetic, and never stop. Jupiter’s magnetosphere is also the largest and most powerful in the solar system. It pulls charged particles from the surrounding environment, including solar winds and even the volcanoes on Io, one of its moons.
NASA has launched a downloadable app that makes it possible to follow Juno’s path.
Read more about NASA’s Juno mission here
It was one hundred and seventeen years ago in Colorado Springs that Nikola Tesla, while working at night with a highly sensitive receiver to detect voltage changes in the earth’s atmosphere, began picking up weak oscillations which he heard as regular beeps. Tesla said: I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth. At first Tesla thought they were atmospheric disturbances from the sun, aurora borealis or earth currents, but he concluded they were ‘interplanetary’ in origin. It is now believed he was picking up a 10 kHz. signal from Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. This could be the earliest (known) observation of radio astronomy. (Research from Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, by W.Bernard Carlson)
Pictures of Infinity 