The American space agency NASA has flown a probe a few thousand kilometres from the swirling cloud tops of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. No other satellite has flown so close to the gas giant1 during the main phase of its mission. With details, our science reporter Jonathan Amos.
When the Juno probe arrived at Jupiter in July, its instruments and camera were switched off2. It had to perform a critical rocket maneuver to get into orbit. And engineers didn’t want the complication of taking pretty pictures at the same time. But after successfully turning around the planet, Juno booted up3 its other systems, skimming over4 the clouds at 130,000 miles an hour. Juno was programmed to acquire ultrahigh resolution images. NASA is expected to release them next week.
Juno’s goal is to investigate what the giant planet is made from and how it’s put together. We should gain new insights for example on the famous Great Red Spot, the massive storm that is raged on Jupiter for hundreds of years.
Jonathan Amos reporting.
Now what exactly should you do if you find yourself stranded on a desert island? One option might be to follow the example of a couple in their fifties who managed to get themselves rescued after going missing while sailing among the remote Micronesian Islands over the western Pacific. Our east Asia editor Cilia Hatton told me their story.
Linus and Sabina Jack, they thought they were just going out for a sail between one islandto another in Micronesia. It would take about a day so they packed a few things in their boat but they really didn’t have a lot of equipment with them. And they ended up on acompletely different island. They were stranded. They ended up being stranded for about a week.
Now what’s amazing is that they used what little they had to save themselves. So theyused a flashlight to signal to a passing oil tanker5 in the distance. That oil tanker notified the US consulate in Micronesia then a search party began involving 14 vessels and two planes searching over all of Micronesia’s thousands of tiny islands. And then amazingly,a plane spotted where the couple was because they spelled “SOS” in the sand. It’s straight outof the movies.
Now we do quite often hear the stories of people going out illiquid, getting lost, some ofthem surviving, some of them ending up dying. What is the advice if you suddenly find yourself out in the wilderness?
Well, all over the BBC has published a quite helpful list, you know, you might not be able to predict when you will get stranded on a desert island just as Linus and Sabina Jack might not have been able to know that they would be.