As NASA’s Juno mission completed its 43rd close flyby of
Jupiter on July 5, 2022, its JunoCam instrument captured this striking
view of vortices — hurricane-like spiral wind patterns — near the
planet’s north pole.
These powerful storms can be over 30 miles (50 kilometers) in height
and hundreds of miles across. Figuring out how they form is key to
understanding Jupiter’s atmosphere, as well as the fluid dynamics and
cloud chemistry that create the planet’s other atmospheric features.
Scientists are particularly interested in the vortices’ varying shapes,
sizes, and colors. For example, cyclones, which spin counter-clockwise
in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern, and
anti-cyclones, which rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and
counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere, exhibit very different
colors and shapes.
A NASA citizen science project, Jovian Vortex Hunter, seeks help from
volunteer members of the public to spot and help categorize vortices
and other atmospheric phenomena visible in JunoCam photos of Jupiter.
This process does not require specialized training or software, and can
be done by anyone, anywhere, with a cellphone or laptop. As of July
2022, 2,404 volunteers had made 376,725 classifications using the Jovian
Vortex Hunter project web site at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ramanakumars/jovian-vortex-hunter.
Another citizen scientist, Brian Swift, created this enhanced color
and contrast view of vortices using raw JunoCam image data. At the time
the raw image was taken, the Juno spacecraft was about 15,600 miles
(25,100 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops, at a latitude of about
84 degrees.
In 2016, the Curiosity rover came across something really peculiar in Gale Crater on Mars.
On
the slope of Mount Sharp, where Curiosity labored, were large
quantities of a rare mineral; rare, at least, here on Earth. Tridymite, a
form of quartz, only seems to form extremely seldom, and under high
temperatures, such as those you might find in magma.
Although Mars shows extensive evidence of past basaltic volcanic activity in some regions, the once putatively water-filled Gale Crater is not one of those regions, leading scientists to puzzle about how the mineral came to be there.
Now
a team led by planetary scientist Valerie Payré of the University of
Arizona have figured out the mystery: that tridymite could have come
from a single, explosive volcanic eruption, around 3.0 to 3.7 billion
years ago.
“The discovery of tridymite in a mudstone in Gale
Crater is one of the most surprising observations that the Curiosity
rover has made in 10 years of exploring Mars,” said Mars geologist Kirsten Siebach of Rice University.
“Tridymite
is usually associated with quartz-forming, explosive, evolved volcanic
systems on Earth, but we found it in the bottom of an ancient lake on
Mars, where most of the volcanoes are very primitive.”
Because we
can’t actually get to Mars, the scientists had two tools for figuring
out the mystery: tridymite deposits found here on Earth, and the mineral
samples collected from Gale Crater and Mount Sharp – the peak at the
crater’s center – by Curiosity, which sends data on its finds back to
Earth.
So that’s where Payré, then at Rice University, and her colleagues turned. …
On this day, 31 July 1962, fascist aristocrat Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirt followers attempted to hold a meeting in Dalston, in London’s East End. But, as occurred in Manchester just two days prior, he was forced to call it off after the meeting was attacked by angry locals.
Upon his arrival the crowd shouted “Down with Mosley!” and he was promptly beaten down.
Learn more against struggles against Mosley in our podcast episodes 35-37 about the 43 Group. In bonus episode 2, one of the participants in this protest tells us about targeting Mosley on this day: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/02/17/e35-37-the-43-group/
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