Year: 2015-2016
Grade: 9 - 12
City: Maracaibo
Teachers: Wolfgang Elizabeth Belazario, Carlos Ramirez, Luis Ruiz
Target: Jupiter
Team members:
Jonar Cubillan (team leader) Luz School
Nay Ciray Valbuena El Prado
Jesus Rodriguez Liceo Los Robles
Luis Manuel Garcia Liceo Los Robles
Maria J. Garcia Altamira
Ricardo Galue Luz school
Christian Barrera Liceo Los Robles
Miguel Angel Montero Colegio Maristas
"What a wonderful opportunity NASA and JPL have designed for studying distant far away planets, in this case a gas giant, fifth in position from the Sun, the king of planets with its almost predictive radio storms -- a massive object that strongly influences all its surroundings in a vast zone of influence -- an opportunity to apply and advance in optical techniques investigation of distant worlds.
With this project perhaps NASA and JPL could verify this long distance optical observation with the now-arriving Juno mission soon. Data could be compared and physical phenomena in Jupiter could be interpreted by comparison of these two science missions. Jupiter is like Saturn's big brother, their characteristics are very converging, so this optical operation combined with Saturn's data and Jupiter's data obtained by Juno, Voyager and Galileo missions could set the the golden rule, the standard rule, the "guide book" for extrasolar planets in distant stars!!
The photographical engineering systems designed by this endeavor would be a novelty never before seen !! Even better, we would also suggest, or propose, before the aged Cassini spacecraft dies away, that similar projects be devised to study surrounding objectives such as Uranus, Neptune, Ceres and why not, even frozen Pluto!! By studying Jupiter and these moons and planets from afar we think that some type of method could be also devised to detect Mercury type planets.
Jupiter is like a mini solar system, and we think that its four larger Galilean moons could exercise some type of influence on Jupiter when photographed from afar! Maybe perhaps even some type of image distortion due to a possible "gravitational lens" -- when a star passes behind Jupiter? How does Jupiter's surroundings "look like" or behave when photographed from this new "angle"?
We ponder... How would an ice covered moon look like or behave when photographed with different color filters from gigantic distances? Could Cassini measure through its photographic equipment subtle micro millimetric variation in their orbits? What a wonderful idea to photograph, study and analyze distant Jupiter from Saturn orbit, we say it's a golden opportunity not to be lost."
