🚀 NASA is set to make the nearest flyby Jupiter's most habitable moon in 22 years

Wednesday

Sept 28 2022

Starting in the 1970s, NASA has sent a series of missions in the vicinity of a sleepy, icy, remote outpost orbiting the inhospitable planet Jupiter. Each pass of this world, Europa, has yielded more and more tantalizing clues to an entire world hiding under a fractured shell of ice and irradiated salts.

While NASA has plans to visit Europa with a dedicated mission set to launch in 2024 (and to arrive a few years later), its current Jupiter mission, Juno, will get a chance to study Europa with the closest approach in 22 years: just 222 miles from the surface.

So why Europa? If you could dig down 10 to 15 miles below its surface, you'd find a vast ocean, anywhere to 100 miles deep. On Earth, where there's water, there's life. And there's twice as much water on Europa than in all of Earth's oceans, even though Europa is smaller than our own moon, aptly named the Moon. This tiny place is one of the best shots at finding life beyond Earth — and it's just 390 million miles away.

What's New

INVERSE CODEX

Ready up for 'Call of Duty: Vanguard' Season 5 Reloaded, soldier

Call Of Duty is entering a new era later in 2022, but it has one last major update in store before Modern Warfare IIlaunches this fall. The final update, Season 5 Reloaded, will come to Vanguardand Warzone, offering a few new features including modes and weapons. While Season 5 Reloaded seems a little light on content, Activision has plenty in store within the coming weeks and months, so there’s plenty to look forward to across other COD games. In the meantime, what can we expect from Season 5 Reloaded and when does it launch? Here’s what you need to know about the final season of Warzone and Vanguard.

EUROPA

NASA is set to make the nearest flyby Jupiter's most habitable moon in 22 years

A NASA Spacecraft is about to give us the closest look yet at Jupiter’s icy, potentially habitable ocean moon Europa.

Early Thursday morning, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will skim just a couple of hundred miles above the frozen surface of Europa. Juno’s instruments will measure the composition of the moon’s thick icy crust, record how the upper layers of its thin oxygen atmosphere interact with Jupiter’s magnetic field, and snap the highest-resolution photos ever of Europa’s cracked, ridged surface. And if mission scientists are extremely lucky, Juno might even catch a plume of water venting out into space.

“We have the right equipment to do the job, but to capture a plume will require a lot of luck,” says Juno’s principal investigator, Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute.

UPSIDE DOWN

New Webb Telescope image reveals an eerie portrait of a familiar galaxy

Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrumentr eveals a stunning spiral galaxy in a whole new light, showing what’s going on behind an already-gorgeous Hubble Space Telescope photo.

In the wavelengths of light our eyes can see, IC 5332 is the perfect image of a spiral galaxy. 29 million light years away, it’s a bit larger than the Milky Way (about 66,000 light years wide) and almost exactly face-on toward Earth, offering us a perfect view.

Hubble captured a dazzling image of the galaxy’s glowing arms of stars, swirling outward from a blazing center, with dark bands in between. It’s classic. But viewed in infrared light, through the James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, the galaxy looks completely different — as if we’ve wandered into the Upside Down from Stranger Things.

RETROSPECTIVE

20 years ago, Jackie Chan's worst sci-fi movie almost killed his career

You know you're in trouble from the film’s first scene. The sun is shining, flowers are blooming, a beautiful deer is sipping from a waterfall... and then we get a close-up of the deer urinating in the water. Expectations have been set, and they’re at rock bottom.

In the action-espionage-“comedy” The Tuxedo,Jackie Chan plays taxi driver Jimmy Tong, famous for getting passengers anywhere they want to go in short order. He may be violating numerous traffic laws and has had his driver’s license suspended nine times, but since his speeding has never actually caused an accident, he miraculously gets to keep his job.

Jimmy’s driving skills earn him a new gig as the personal chauffeur of a renowned international spy. Once his boss falls into a coma following a murder attempt, Jimmy takes over his identity — and his high-tech tuxedo — to help save the world.

GOTTA GO FAST

Mysterious new deep-space radio burst may have extreme origins — study

Over the last 15 years, mysterious radio bursts — first from other galaxies, and then our own — have puzzled astronomers from around the world by repeating irregularly with no clear mechanism to cause it. Were they the collision of black holes? Blasts from supernovae? Ultra-magnetized neutron stars? Aliens?

Two papers released this month dealing with one of these fast radio bursts (or FRBs) might have an answer — for at least some of them. In Nature, a team argued that one recently detected FRB is from an unusual spot with an unusual nature. In Nature Communications, another team analyzed its oddities to determine that that signal is coming not from one star, but from two.

Meanwhile...

Researchers uncover how your brain knows something is food

This new Webb Telescope picture of the beloved Orion Nebula is glorious

'Daredevil: Born Again' won't be the Netflix follow-up fans wanted

'She-Hulk' Episode 5 finally solves its biggest Marvel mystery

Today in history: On September 28, 2008, SpaceX successfully launched Falcon 1, becoming the first privately owned company to send a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit.

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🚀 NASA is set to make the nearest flyby Jupiter's most habitable moon in 22 years

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