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Did NASA Accidentally "Nuke" Jupiter »
Posted by: Varadinum 2 years, 9 months agoOn September 21, 2003 NASA deliberately directed its amazing, still-functioning Galileo spacecraft to make one final, 108,000 mph suicidal plunge into Jupiter's vast atmosphere. Thus ended the incredibly successful eight-year unmanned NASA Galileo mission ... which had returned against all odds an array of phenomenal new information on Jupiter and
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Comments: 89
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KSUmarksman
April 9, 2007, 11:47 a.m.hardly...
"several kilotons" is nothing when compared with the energy of the Shomaker Levy 9 comet impacts (thousands of MEGATONS).
I seriously doubt that such a weak nuclear explosion would have done anything to Jupiter which would be observable from Earth.
To relate the values I mentioned to common events:
it was estimated that if teh comet fragments hit Earth they could wipe out nearly all life, so they are equivalent to the whole nuclear arsenals of both the US and USSR at the height of the Cold War. A device in the "tens of kilotons" wuch as the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only powerful enough to destroy a section of a large city and cause significant damage to a major portion of that city.
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Petom1
April 9, 2007, 12:29 p.m.So I guess its official- George Bush has declared war on Jupiter. Better to fight them there than on our own soil...
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droid3913
April 9, 2007, 2:02 p.m.Oh here we go. Where's the enviromental wackos at? Do you remember what Jupiter is made of? Gases! A 3rd grader knows that!
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weasel162get8
April 9, 2007, 3:10 p.m.there is know telling what has happened,since Bush has got into office,two-faced a**. Why haven't they bought impeachment charges on him YET?
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slyboy2
April 9, 2007, 4:02 p.m.just a case of big kids throwing firecrackers into a barrel of water to see what it would do.
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eviln3d
April 9, 2007, 5:49 p.m.Maybe we need to figure out how to ignite it. It could melt the ice on the moons of Jupiter and we could move there when we burn up earth with the global warming.
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BSdetective
April 9, 2007, 5:57 p.m.Just so folks know, Hoaxland's a long time k00k that claims to have found cities on mars by examining bad JPEGs.
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knight-templer
April 9, 2007, 6:19 p.m.So I guess were at war with Jupiter too! Thank's NASA; do you think you could arrange a satellite malfunction over Iran next time or what? Apparently Jupitonian Authorities have logged a very strong complaint with the UN!
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Morginie
April 9, 2007, 6:44 p.m.LOl when I was going to open the discussion here I thought to myself "this will be nice, at last a discussion without people fighting about politics"
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sixshot
April 9, 2007, 7:09 p.m.did anyone notice the star trek emblem at the top of this april fools joke.
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foksipayne
April 9, 2007, 7:31 p.m.Oh no! now thee aliens are gonna come and wipe us out!!lol
If this is for real tho, it could cause some sort of reaction in the solar system. that could be bad...
...still interesting, even if it's fake! :)
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0gramstransfat
April 9, 2007, 10:05 p.m.Isn't Jupiter made up of hydrogen and helium anyway? How come no issue is made about the 300 nukes our government intentionally set off between 1945 and the mid-1960s? I wonder if those could have something to do with the state of our planet now?
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capn_caveman
April 9, 2007, 10:07 p.m.Wow, I actually had to laugh a bit as I read this. This article is even a bit too preposterous for conspiracy theorists. Nothing, but nothing in this article really makes sense. Move along people, nothing to see here.
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vidman04
April 9, 2007, 10:38 p.m.labassistant, I think you need to get out more....away from the chemicals in that lab....
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Macondo
April 10, 2007, 12:42 a.m.Varadinum.
Thanks for this fascinating article.
It has scientific facts with educational value presented in a understandable format.
I was lead to take the issue as a factual occurrence down to the last paragraphs.
The conclusion was a surprise!
Was it pure science? Was it science fiction ?
Great anyway !
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El_CiDney
April 10, 2007, 1:36 a.m.Richard, Richard, Richard...what's wrong? Not enough people buying into The Face on Mars any more?
C'mon...'nuke' a gasball over 88,000 miles in diameter? There's more reaction vs the planetary volume when you set off a 4th Of July firecracker here. The specific reason the spacecraft was sent into the Jovian atmosphere was that it would be crushed by the atmospheric pressure, neutralizing it, and preventing Europa from being contaminated.
This is just another case of throwing a bunch of 'science' at the wall, and hoping something sticks, thereby garnering face time.
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worldmaker
April 10, 2007, 5:37 a.m.Damn that Columbus, the world would still be flat if it wasn't for people like him challenging the church.
Hoagland may be wrong about a lot of things, but he sets your mind thinking that, just maybe, there's another explanation.
So what was NASA's theory about the dust stop?
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MRCOFFEECAKE
April 12, 2007, 1:08 p.m.Question: How much time did Clinton spend blaming Bush and
Reagan?
Answer: Reduced (then) record deficit turned to surplus, lower gas prices,more Americands buying homes, forced welfare mothers to go to work and no outsourcing...
He had no time to blame anyone..he just did what we expect
from our Presidents..he tried and tried and kept trying..
He got positive results..our lives were all better then!
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sotiris-k
April 15, 2007, 7:56 p.m.This scenario has so many problems and requires so many things to work the right way that is entirely unlikely to have occured. It looks scientific enough to convince the novice with the illusion or relevance to reality . But there are so many issues here. Even if all this happened the criticality (and its not even 239) is not achieved fast enough like in a typical nuclear weapon. The process described is by the time the pressure becomes important to implode it so gradual that it can be seen as adiabatic (slow near equilibrium) . There is nothing sudden about it . The pellets are by then so far from each other due to chaos and diffusion and they do not necessarily reach critical mass at the same time . When a detonation takes place it does because of a sudden surge on neutrons above the critical chain reaction ratio. But this here will not happen this way.What will happen here is what has happened in the past in manhattan project and other labs criticality accidents. No detonation.
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