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National Aeronautics and Space Administration News Conference on Voyager 2-Jupiter Encounter Footings Room Sheraton Park Hotel W It - t 1 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA --- NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION --- NEWS CONFERENCE ON VOYAGER 2-JUPITER ENCOUNTER (I?ASA-TB-80854) NEUS CCIPERENCE OH N80-15008 I VOY1GE3-2-JUPITER ENCOUNTER (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) 53 p CSCL OSE Unclas 00/91 44072 FOOTINGS ROOM SHERATON PARK HOTEL I ,, WASHINGTON, D. C. I 1 /, e-- i I:: 1; I I.-) /j *TOE MC RODER'l"'; 'J MA Tlc ad q LI art e r s ! 9 RODNEY A. MILLS Program Manager, NASA I!q. DR. EDWARD STONE Project Scientist California Institute of Technology LAURENCE Imaging Team Deputy Team I!) liIi DR. SODERBLOM /I Leader ZtJ 11 U. S. Geological Survey I "I I DR. NSRMAN NESS Magnetic Fields 1 Goddard Space Flight Cente DR. JOHN C. PEARL Infrared Spectroscopy and I Radiometry, Goddnrd 1I 21 DR. FREDERICK L. SCARE' Plasma Wave Science TRW Systems z.-, ! - NEAL R. GROSS COURT.--- REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 'I 1 -----INDEX STATEMENT OF: .'I Rodney Mills 1 I "John C. Pearl Frederick L. Scarf Norman Ness I NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1330 VERMONT AVENUE, NW WAWIIUCTAU np ---,.* 3 -----------PROCEEDINGS (10:30 a.m.) MR. MC ROBERTS: Good morning. I'm Joe McRoberts, from NASA headquarters. John Kley is passing around a little tablet there. Jot your names down and we will give you a copy of the tran- script. Of course, if you don't need the transcript, why, trhatever. Transckipts will be available in about a week. We lave pictures. Les Gaver, of course, has pictures. Bob dcMillan, from JPL, is here and also has pictures. He also 18s hackqround information and so forth. John Kley is here from Goddard, and he can help you In any of the Goddard people or anything you want to know lbout that . The news conference is being piped out to JPL, and 'e will start off with Rod Mills, the Program Manager at NASA eadquarters but, first, I want to just introduce Dr. Milton itz, proqram scientists, who is here in the audience. All right, Rod, would you step up, please? STATEMENT OF RODNEY MILLS PROGRAM MANAGER NASA HEADQUARTERS MR. MILLS: Okay. Before we get to the science re- sults, I just want to make a brief report on the mission statu8 1) 5 '/Ithas been a couple of months since most of you have heard /I NEAL R. GROSS // COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1330 VERMONT AVENUE, NW \ \ (2021 234-4433 WASHINGTON. D.C. 20005 ,.)n,\ *L* .I-= . 4 about it. Voyager 1 is continuing on its way to Saturn, in good condition. As of noon today, t is 84+ million kilome-ers past Jupiter, and it's got about 725 million kilometers to go to Saturn. Voyager 2, as of noon today, is 31.4 million kilomet- ers from Jupiter, headed inward and, for reference, it is about 842 million kilometers from earth at this time. I Since we last spoke to most of y~u,there have been a couple of spacecraft events I want to discuss. First, Voyage1 1 performed its large trajectory correction maneuver on April 90 That was about a 7.3 hour burn of the thrusters that h- parted a delta-V of something like 64 meters per second; used up about 30 kilograms of our propellant and, at this time, we have left about 55 kilograms of propellant. We anticipate that we can track Voyager 1 far out beyond Saturn, probably out maybe 30 AU or more. Voyager 2 last Friday performed a minor trajectory I!! correction maneuver to improve the aiming at Jupiter. That "" was just a small, about a I+ meter per second adjustment in Ij/I "I , the velocity. It is now on a good trajectory for Jupiter 1 --') 4 *which, of course, it will reach on July 9. Voyager 2 has been in the encounter period since ,li April 24. It has been in the observatory phase observing -1,- Jupiter around the clock. NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1330 VERMONT AVENLJF NW 5 For the last few LAYS, the spacecraft has been in- volved in obtaining a five-rotation movie of Jupiter. Vow, yesterday we started the far Eacounter 1 observations. Everything is going well with the spacecraft. If you will remember, it is the one that has radio problems -- :hat is# it's primary radio failed quite sometime ago, and its secondary radio, which we are using to command it, has a a shorted capacitor which somewhat limits the frequency tracking capability. But we have had no recent problems in commanding, snd everything looks like "go" for the encounter. I think that's all I have to sayt so onward with the science report. MR. MC ROBERTS: Okay. Our first science report from Goddard Space Flight Center, MR. PEARL: Thank yout and good morning. Our instrument has two parts; one is a radiometer :hannel which integrates over most of the solar spectrum, from sbout .3 of a micron out to about 2 micronso and the other is m infrared spectrometer. As you are probably aware, spectrometers split up the energy into its various wavelength components, such a5 YOU 3ee a prism or a raindrop with solar radiation breaking it into NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIEERS 1330 VERMONT AVENUE, NW I.,,._. -.- (2021 234-4433 WASHINGTON. D.C. 20005 6 its spectrum of colors. Our instrument does the same thing with the infra- red, essentially, breaking the heat radiation up into its what you might call "infrared colors". The results I would like to discuss today are results' from the spectrometer. Amalthea is the innermost moon of Jupiter. Its I I diameter, if you take an average diameter, it is about a 20th I I or a little more of the diameter of the earth's moon. On the flyby of Jupiter, we got a glimpse of it when the spacecraft was about the same distance from it as the earth is from the earth's moon. At that time, the satellite only filled about 1 per- cent of our field of view, and the data that we got were Some- what noisy. The first slide shows the spectrum that we got. As I said,the data were noisy. We plotted the intensity, as a function of the, call it the "infrared color" defined by wave number. For those of you who like to think in terms of wave- lengths, the wave numberis the reciprocal of the wavelength. 200 wave numbersis 50 micrometers, 400 is 25, 1,000 is 10 micrometers . The solid curves you see superimposed on the data represent the spectrum that we would see if the object we were looking at had the temperatures indicated. NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS I through the magnetic field around Jupiter. If I may have the next slide. We were fortunate, in the observations of 10, to see several anomalously warm Places- lou can see two of them on this figure, one corresponds to I region, and the other area corresponds to the dark, annular mea just above center on the left. Schematically, our observation of that feature is represented, as shown here. It contains some dark areas which ire believed to be warmer than the surrounding area. This .ncludes that annular, doughnut-shaped region and that elongatc NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1330 VERMONT AVENUE, NW (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON nr .)nnn= 8 dark region above it. It is known from other images that a plume of gas and dust is evolving from one end of the linear feature. Now, if we consider the fact that the dark areas are a different temperature from the light background, then we can make a fit to the data just by assuming that the dark areas are at one temperature and the light areas at another temperature and, if we do that, we get a set of curves that looks like this. The dark curve represents the intensity as a function of wave numberthat we meaSure, the heavy dark curve, and the two dotted and dashed curves represent components from two different temperatures. We assume that if 9 percent of the field is at 280 kelvin, then the contribution to the data from an object like that would give you the short, dashed curve. That leaves the remaining 91 percent at some other temperature. If we take 125 kelvin for that temperature, then ve get the longer,dashed curve and, if we add them together, Ire get the thin, solid curve, which fits the data reasonably tell. Considering the fact that the model is so simple, it really does very well. We vary the parameters a little bit, try to take Lifferent temperatures and so on, and we find that, on the rhole, the dark areas, or large fractions of them, must be NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1330 VERMONT AVENUE, NW (2021 234 4433 WASHINGTON. Q C 20005 ilnll ?Al.AAA< 9 1 somewhere between 280 kelvin and 300 kelvin, and the background, Ishould be between 125 and 130 kelvin, and that isn’t too far :I from what one would expect for the background temperature if 1 it were just heated by the sun. 5 The 9 percent, actually, is derived from the fit. We make a three-parameter fit; one is the fraction of the area I r; // 7 of the hot temperature, and the other is the remainder. And X the 9 percent corresponds quite well, actually, to the dark !J regions in the field of view. So, again, it’s confirmatory, since it is an inde- 11 pendent evaluation parameter.
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