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NASA’s Juno Gives Aerial Views of Mountain, Lava Lake on Io – NASA

This animation is an artist’s concept of Loki Patera, a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io, made using data from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. With multiple islands in its interior, Loki is a depression filled with magma and rimmed with molten lava. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

Imagery from the solar-powered spacecraft provides close-ups of intriguing features on the hellish Jovian moon.

Scientists on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have transformed data collected during two recent flybys of Io into animations that highlight two of the Jovian moon’s most dramatic features: a mountain and an almost glass-smooth lake of cooling lava. Other recent science results from the solar-powered spacecraft include updates on Jupiter’s polar cyclones and water abundance.

The new findings were announced Wednesday, April 16, by Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton during a news conference at the European Geophysical Union General Assembly in Vienna.

Juno made extremely close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, getting within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the surface, obtaining the first close-up images of the moon’s northern latitudes.

“Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action,” said Bolton. “We also got some great close-ups and other data on a 200-kilometer-long (127-mile-long) lava lake called Loki Patera. There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”

Maps generated with data collected by Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument reveal Io not only has a surface that is relatively smooth compared to Jupiter’s other Galilean moons, but also has poles that are colder than middle latitudes.

Pole Position

During Juno’s extended mission, the spacecraft flies closer to the north pole of Jupiter with each pass. This changing orientation allows the MWR instrument to improve its resolution of Jupiter’s northern polar cyclones. The data allows multiwavelength comparisons of the poles, revealing that not all polar cyclones are created equal.

“Perhaps most striking example of this disparity can be found with the central cyclone at Jupiter’s north pole,” said Steve Levin, Juno’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It is clearly visible in both infrared and visible light images, but its microwave signature is nowhere near as strong as other nearby storms. This tells us that its subsurface structure must be very different from these other cyclones. The MWR team continues to collect more and better microwave data with every orbit, so we anticipate developing a more detailed 3D map of these intriguing polar storms.”

Jovian Water

One of the mission’s primary science goals is to collect data that could help scientists better understand Jupiter’s water abundance. To do this, the Juno science team isn’t hunting for liquid water. Instead, they are looking to quantify the presence of oxygen and hydrogen molecules (the molecules that make up water) in Jupiter’s atmosphere. An accurate estimate is critical to piecing together the puzzle of our solar system’s formation.

Created using data collected by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno during flybys in December 2023 and February 2024, this animation is an artist’s concept of a feature on the Jovian moon Io that the mission science team nicknamed “Steeple Mountain.” Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

Jupiter was likely the first planet to form, and it contains most of the gas and dust that wasn’t incorporated into the Sun. Water abundance also has important implications for the gas giant’s meteorology (including how wind currents flow on Jupiter) and internal structure.

In 1995, NASA’s Galileo probe provided an early dataset on Jupiter’s water abundance during the spacecraft’s 57-minute descent into the Jovian atmosphere. But the data created more questions than answers, indicating the gas giant’s atmosphere was unexpectedly hot and — contrary to what computer models had indicated — bereft of water.

“The probe did amazing science, but its data was so far afield from our models of Jupiter’s water abundance that we considered whether the location it sampled could be an outlier. But before Juno, we couldn’t confirm,” said Bolton. “Now, with recent results made with MWR data, we have nailed down that the water abundance near Jupiter’s equator is roughly three to four times the solar abundance when compared to hydrogen. This definitively demonstrates that the Galileo probe’s entry site was an anomalously dry, desert-like region.”

The results support the belief that the during formation of our solar system, water-ice material may have been the source of the heavy element enrichment (chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium that were accreted by Jupiter) during the gas giant’s formation and/or evolution. The formation of Jupiter remains puzzling, because Juno results on the core of the gas giant suggest a very low water abundance — a mystery that scientists are still trying to sort out.

Data during the remainder of Juno’s extended mission may help, both by enabling scientists to compare Jupiter’s water abundance near the polar regions to the equatorial region and by shedding additional light on the structure of the planet’s dilute core.

During Juno’s most recent flyby of Io, on April 9, the spacecraft came within about 10,250 miles (16,500 kilometers) of the moon’s surface. It will execute its 61st flyby of Jupiter on May 12.

More About the Mission

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft.

More information about Juno is available at:

https://www.nasa.gov/juno

News Media Contacts

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Charles Blue
NASA Headquarters, Washington
301-286-6284 / 202-802-5345
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / charles.e.blue@nasa.gov

Deb Schmid
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
210-522-2254
dschmid@swri.org

2024-045

Entertainment news

LinkedIn launches gaming: three logic puzzles aiming to extend time spent on its networking platform – TechCrunch

Back in March, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was quietly testing the waters for games on its platform — word and logic puzzles similar to Wordle. Now, in an effort to attract more users and increase engagement, the platform is launching three of those games officially.

Queens, Crossclimb and Pinpoint — respectively testing your abilities in logic, trivia and word association — will be available globally starting today, both via a direct link to the games and by way of LinkedIn News, the division that developed them.

Similar to Wordle, each of these games can be played just once a day. For now, you can invite your first-degree connections to play a game together, and your status — whether or not you’ve played a game, and how well you fared — can be shared with those connections if you opt in.

Those social levers, as well as the number of games, are still up for discussion, so things might change over time. For now, LinkedIn plans to continue developing the games itself, independent of its owner, Microsoft, and its substantial gaming operation.

LinkedIn says that it sees the games as a more casual way to knit existing LinkedIn connections closer together.

“It is hard for people to stay in touch with each other, and games provide a way to build these network ties,” said Dan Roth, the VP and editor in chief of LinkedIn News, in an interview.

There is more to it than that, though. The fact that these were conceived of and built by the LinkedIn News team is significant. LinkedIn’s games borrow heavily from the portfolios that newspapers like The New York Times have built with their own word and logic games over the years, starting with crosswords and more recently expanding into a wider range of puzzles. Most of these were built in-house, but some were acquired (NYT acquired the viral hit Wordle in 2022).

And, games have proven to be somewhat of a secret weapon for driving engagement, especially at a time when news publishers are scrambling to figure out what the future of their businesses look like, and TikTok and Instagram appear to be cornering the market for younger users.

Puzzles published by news titles and magazines attract millions of users, who in turn become part of those titles’ wider audiences, and potentially can turn into readers of the rest of their content.

Similarly, LinkedIn, with more than 1 billion users, has been developing its news and content operation to expand engagement on its platform. Like newspapers, it also has a substantial advertising business as well as paywalls for those who want to use it a bit more. Games sweeten the deal for extending that engagement to beef up its advertising audience, and to potentially give more value to users.

A little about the three games:

Image Credits: LinkedIn.com (opens in a new window) under a license.

Queens is a riff on Sudoku, and you have to figure out how to arrange crowns in patterns that do not overlap with each other within a time limit. As you can see from the screenshot, you can share scores with individuals, but your company affiliation appears on a leaderboard.

I asked if this could become problematic or distracting, given the restrictions some organizations put on using social media at work. Laura Lorenzetti, executive editor for LinkedIn in North America, said the one-game-per-day limitation, and the fact that the games are short, should help with those issues.

“They are contained and they’re intended to be contained, because we don’t want people wasting their time,” she said. “That is not what we’re here for!”

Image Credits: LinkedIn.com (opens in a new window) under a license.

Crossclimb is described as a trivia game. The player is given clues for words, which in turn have to fit on a grid where the words change by one letter with each subsequent clue to eventually form a different word.

I found this one to be harder than it looks if you don’t guess the first word for a start. (Another player countered that it was her favorite.) As with Queens, you see a company leaderboard here, too.

Image Credits: LinkedIn.com (opens in a new window) under a license.

Lastly we have Pinpoint, which seemed so similar to Connections — the New York Times game — that I kept slipping up and calling it “Connections” during my interview. The game involves finding a connection between words that you’re given, although the words are not immediately revealed, and you are asked to try to find the connection in as few reveals as possible. I found this also quite difficult in my early attempts.

As we’ve noted previously, LinkedIn is far from being the first social network to bake gaming into the platform to increase how much time its users spend using it. But even the biggest and most expensive efforts have seen mixed results. Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, has been a major driver of social gaming over the years, but in 2022, it shut down its standalone gaming app amid a decline in usage. It’s putting significantly more focus these days on mixed reality experiences and its Meta Quest business.

LinkedIn — designed for professional networking and specifically for job hunting and recruitment — has long been trying to find ways to get people to engage on its platform in more natural and less transactional ways. Games are transactional by nature, but the transactions are based on gameplay: If LinkedIn can get users hooked on these, the hope is that they may stay for more.

Entertainment news

Man stabs and kills another with beer bottle – Chronicle

Man stabs and kills another with beer bottle

Bongokuhle Moyo, Online Reporter

A MASVINGO man was remanded in custody for murder after stabbing the another on the neck with an empty bottle of beer after being accused of stealing from the victim’s sister.

In a statement on X, the National Prosecuting Authority of Zimbabwe (NPAZ) said: “On the fateful day, Itai Edson Simango found Joseph Hungwe drinking beer with his two nephews. Soon after joining them, an argument broke out between the accused and the now-deceased. The now deceased reportedly accused the accused person of stealing from his sister’s house.”

Simango, according to the NPAZ, allegedly picked up an empty beer bottle and stabbed Hungwe once on the neck.

“The now deceased bled profusely and subsequently died from the injury. The accused was remanded in custody until his next court date on 14 May 2024”, said the NPAZ

Entertainment news

‘Wall of death’ workout on the moon could keep lunar settlers in shape – Sky News

Running around a ‘wall of death’ could keep people healthy on the moon, according to new research.

Scientists at the University of Milan tied people to bungee cords to replicate lunar gravity and asked them to run around a rented ‘wall of death’, which they had loaned from an amusement park.

The test subjects needed to run fast enough to prevent themselves skidding down the wall which is usually impossible on Earth. With the reduced gravity created by the bungee cords, they were able to stick to the wall for multiple laps.

The exercise had a high enough impact that “just twice a day, for three or four laps” would be enough to keep astronauts’ muscles and bones healthy on the moon, researcher Professor Alberto Minetti told Sky News.

“We were very surprised,” added Professor Minetti.

Exercise on the moon has concerned researchers for years. The reduced gravity up there means astronauts’ muscles are bearing 83% less body weight than on Earth.

Without all that load-bearing, astronauts risk their fitness levels dropping, their muscles atrophying, and symptoms similar to osteoporosis developing as their bones become brittle.

Signs of this are sometimes visible when they land back on Earth after a stint in the International Space Station and need help to stand up or walk.

Professor Minetti, Francesco Luciano, Valentina Natalucci and Gaspare Pavei wanted to find a “time and cost-effective way” to stay fit on the moon and the ‘wall of death’ might be surprisingly practical.

Although its shape isn’t common here on Earth, some of the housing planned for the moon is circular, according to Professor Minetti, and around the right diameter for the ‘wall of death’ workout.

That would mean few extra materials would need to be lugged up there as the astronauts could just run around the walls of their homes.

“In theory, there would be no extra electricity, no extra space and it would not interfere too much with the work of the astronauts and the other activities,” he said.

The Artemis mission, led by NASA, will involve the building of a permanent camp on the moon.

“Early missions will include short-surface stays, but as the base camp evolves, the goal is to allow crew to stay at the lunar surface for up to two months at a time,” according to NASA’s Artemis website.

The astronauts there will be working towards the first mission to send humans to Mars, as well as exploring how life can be sustained on the moon.