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Posted by baalke on March 20, 2007, 7:06 pm
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http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/032007.html
Alice Views Jupiter and Io
New Horizons
March 20, 2007
This graphic illustrates the pointing and shows the data from one of
many observations made by the New Horizons Alice ultraviolet
spectrometer (UVS) instrument during the Pluto-bound spacecraft's
recent
encounter with Jupiter. The red lines in the graphic show the scale,
orientation, and position of the combined "box and slot" field of view
of the Alice UVS during this observation.
The positions of Jupiter's volcanic moon, Io, the torus of ionized gas
from Io, and Jupiter are shown relative to the Alice field of view.
Like
a prism, the spectrometer separates light from these targets into its
constituent wavelengths.
"These ultraviolet datasets are spectacular, simply spectacular," said
New Horizons Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern, of the Southwest
Research Institute, who also serves as PI of the Alice instrument.
"The
team is ecstatic over the richness of the spectral data and what that
promises to reveal about Io's complex relationship with Jupiter."
Dr. Kurt Retherford, New Horizons science team collaborator from the
Southwest Research Institute, said, "The Alice team aimed the
instrument's field of view to simultaneously obtain spectra of three
major targets in the Jupiter system: the moon Io, the ionized gas
torus
Io creates around Jupiter, and Jupiter itself."
Io's volcanoes produce an extremely tenuous atmosphere made up
primarily
of sulfur dioxide gas, which, in the harsh plasma environment at Io,
breaks down into its component sulfur and oxygen atoms. Alice observed
the auroral glow from these atoms in Io's atmosphere and their ionized
counterparts in the Io torus.
"This UV observation of Io surpasses those from all previous
spacecraft
to visit Jupiter in terms of signal quality and wavelength coverage,
and
this is only the first of roughly 80 such spectra to be downlinked to
Earth," said Retherford. "The Alice observations of Jupiter's upper
atmosphere can tell us much about the concentrations of gases there."
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
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