17 January 2008

Jean Preston, Counsellor for Environment, Science and Technology, interviews Scott Bolton, January 17, 2008

Begin transcript

This is Jean Preston, I’m the for Environment, Science and Technology Affairs Counsellor here at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration it’s planning a very exciting new mission to Jupiter, called the Juno Mission, in which the Italian Space Agency (ASI) is playing an important part and I have with me here Dr. Scott Bolton of the South West Research Institute, who is the Principal Investigator for the Juno Mission.

Dr. Scott.

Thank you very much

Tell us, what do we hope to learn from the Juno Mission?

Well, purpose of the Juno Mission is to help us understand the history of our Solar System and how the planets were formed and the reason that we go out to Jupiter to learn about our history even how the Earth was formed is because Jupiter is so massive it has been able to hold on to all of its original materials from when it first formed. Here on the Earth, we have got a surface that continuously gets reprocessed through volcanoes and earth-quakes and …..plaque tectonics…. plus we have a lot of atmosphere chemistry and so we can’t really study the Earth to see how the Earth was like, what was like in the early days when Earth first formed because all of it has changed and we’ve lost most of our original materials. However Jupiter because it is so massive it’s held on to all these original materials and so when we want to go back and say what was the Earth what was the Solar system like in the first days when the Sun formed Jupiter is probably the best target for us to study and understand what kind of materials were there, how did they form, how did the planet, how the first planet formed, what kind of materials came together, what was the process like. I often say that we study Jupiter and we are trying to determine the ingredients of the early Solar system and what the ingredients were to make a planet and once we understand those ingredients the scientists will then go and try to figure out the recipe.

Very interesting. And Why is the Mission named Juno?

The Mission is named Juno primarily due to the link to Roman mythology. Jupiter of course was the king of the gods, the most powerful of the gods, and Juno in Roman mythology was his wife. Also his sister. The mythology guys did things a little funnier. So, the story goes that Juno had very special powers and was a wife and a sister and a mother that really stood for all the good values of motherhood and family values and things like that, and she would come in and check on Jupiter every so often and she, there are some famous mythology tales where she used her special powers to be able to see through the veil of clouds that Jupiter had around himself and she could penetrate and see through those clouds to see the true nature of Jupiter. And that’s exactly what our Juno spacecraft has been equipped with special scientific instruments to be able to see through the clouds so that we can see the interior of Jupiter is like, what it is made of inside, what its structure is like, essentially what its true nature is.

Very very interesting. How exactly does it see inside?

Well, we have three different instruments that are specifically designed to look inside of Jupiter in different ways. One is as we look at the gravity field, which is an invisible force field that comes out of the [...] of the planet that basically represents how much mass and how the materials are distributed inside the planet. And by measuring the gravity field with very sensitive instruments we can get a whole picture of how the materials are distributed inside of Jupiter, even to the point of whether there is a solid core in the middle or whether is just gas all the way down. So we look at the invisible force field of gravity, we have another set of instruments that are called magnetometers that are looking at the magnetic field, another invisible force field. And this you can think back to the days when you played with maybe iron [...] and you had a magnet and you can see how those things would change shape if you have ever done that in school. We are essentially looking at the magnetic field of Jupiter and that will tell us a little bit about how the flows are inside of Jupiter and what the interior is like as well in a different way, and then we finally have something called microwave radiometers and these are essentially radio antennas that can sense beneath the clouds and depending on their wave length or their frequency [...]they see to different levels inside the clouds and so we are sort of like a radar if you are familiar with radar, radar can sometimes see down beneath the surface or through the clouds and see what the surface is like or even a little bit down into the sands of deserts. Well, these are passive radars we are not sending a signal into Jupiter we are just listening. But we get to see through the atmosphere, through the same kind of technique and the same physics. And so these three different ways tell us a lot about the inside of Jupiter and what the composition is and how it came together.

And since we are here in Italy, what are the particular Italian contributions to the Mission?

There is a couple of Italian contributions. Hardware wise they are providing two scientific instruments that will help us in the mission: one is an infrared camera and that’s also called the spectrometer which means can look at the wave lengths[...] in a very high detail and it does in the infrared so it’s looking at basically heat type of pictures. Then the other instrument is called radio science which is going to help us understand the gravity field. And I described they are doing one part of that gravity science experiment one particular frequency where there is a lot of expertise here in Italy and they can really help us. In addition to that there are fe[...] Scientists that are tied and have being part of the Mission since the beginning they will help understand how to interpret the data to figure out how the whole Solar system was formed and what it means with regards to how planets form themselves throughout the universe.