Discovery AO Details Emerge

Details of the next NASA Discovery Program Mission Announcement of Opportunity have been released by NASA. The draft of the AO will be released next month, but a few of the key elements of the document are now available. Discovery missions are low-cost, Principal Investigator-led projects. For this AO, any solar system target is acceptable, excluding the Earth and the Sun. So Mars missions would be acceptable.

For an Io mission like IVO, there are a few key details to consider. First, Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generators (ASRGs) can be used as power sources for a proposed mission. If a proposer wishes to use them, NASA will provide two of them at no cost to the project's cost cap. This decision will allow the missions developed under the DSMCE concept study program to be proposed for this AO. However, there is one problem for the Io Volcano Observer. The cost cap for the next Discovery mission is currently set at $425 million (FY10). This is $25 million less than planned for in the DSMCE program, and the IVO team already needed to find a way to cut $21 million from the cost estimate provided by JPL's Team X. So the current cost cap would make it difficult to do a mission like IVO even with the power sources provided by NASA. One point I should make though is that I am not sure if the $471 million cost estimate for IVO by Team X included the launch vehicle as that will be provided by NASA at no cost to the mission's cost cap.

According the announcement by NASA, 2-3 missions will be approved to continue to Phase A, allowing for a refinement of the mission concepts. After the completion of Phase A, one mission will be selected to go to Phase B and then on to mission completion. This setup is probably intended to prevent some of the cost overruns that have plagued many of the recent Discovery program missions like MESSENGER and Dawn. Downselection to Phase A should occur in July 2010 and then to the single mission in November 2011.

Tip of the plutonium to Van Kane.

EDIT 07/14/2009: Since this post seems to be pretty popular for people looking for info on the Discovery AO, I should point out that launch vehicle costs (along with ASRGs) are excluded from the cost cap, which should make it was easier for proposals like IVO to meet the $425 million (FY10) limit.

Link: NASA intends to release a Discovery Program Draft AO [nspires.nasaprs.com]

Hubble Servicing Mission Launches

The Space Shuttle Atlantis launched earlier today to perform the fourth and last servicing mission of the Hubble Space Telescope. This Shuttle mission should restore the functionality of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). The shuttle astronauts should also install two additional instruments: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) - a high-spectral resolution ultraviolet spectrometer - and the Wide Field Camera 3, an upgrade from WFPC2.

Hubble over the years has made a number of discoveries at Io including observing surface changes between Voyager and Galileo (such as a major eruption at Ra between 1994 and 1995) and sulfur gas in Pele's plume. These discoveries were made using the full-set of instruments onboard the space telescope, and no doubt these new instruments would certainly be useful for the study of Io, particularly studying the gases in Io's atmosphere using the COS spectrometer. Because of the high demand on telescope time, Hubble is not well suited for change detection, but certainly comparisons between any chance images of Io could be used for this purpose, but they would need to be large changes like the one at the Ra Patera eruption.

Link: Hubble Servicing Mission 4 [sm4.gsfc.nasa.gov]

My 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast

My podcast for the 365 Days of Astronomy should be online later today, if it isn't already. The topic of my podcast is "It's the Season for Eclipses in the Jupiter System." Here is the summary I submitted for this edition:

In 2009, as it does every six years, the Jupiter system experiences equinox. While Jupiter's low axial tilt makes the passing of season much less noticeable than on Earth, Mars, or Saturn, equinox does bring a season of eclipses for Jupiter's moons. From Earth, astronomers can observe these eclipses as well as occultations, when one moon passes in front of another. Today, we will discuss the useful science gained from eclipses and occultations as well as a few of the eclipses coming up in the Jupiter system, focusing primarily on Jupiter's innermost large moon, Io.

I cover both the equinoxes to be experienced by Jupiter and Saturn in the podcast, looking at the unique events that can be observed during the months surrounding equinox as well as look at the types of changes that occur in these two systems as the seasons change.

I hope you all have a chance to check it out! You can also read the blog post that was the genesis for this podcast.

Link: 365 Days of Astronomy - It's the Season for Eclipses in the Jupiter System [365daysofastronomy.org]

Accepted Inevitable; Now on Twitter

There are some new web trends that I grab onto with both hands. There are others, like Twitter, that I avoid for the longest time before breaking down. Well, I have finally accepted the inevitable and joined Twitter. You can follow me at my twitter page. What in the world will I post on Twitter? Funny stories I see online. Brief mentions on what I am working on now. The occasional reaction to any Io news that comes out before I have the time to write up a longer blog post here. The occasional non-sense. I am not sure yet. I will need to find some desktop app that will allow me to post quick Twitter posts without needing to remember to get the twitter page open...

So, if you use Twitter, you can now follow me... But please, not too closely.

Link: Jason Perry (volcanopele) on Twitter [twitter.com]

OPAG Spring Meeting Presentations

Well, Hey Hey all! You've probably been wondering where in the world I have been. Well, I have been around, but unfortunately there hasn't been much news lately, and I've been spending my free time playing Europa Universalis III rather than processing Io images. Sorry, but it is true. I think it was time well spent. I just conquered Constantinople. I feel rather proud of myself. So I haven't abandoned you all. I will try to post more often. I'm sure there are scraps of news I've missed.

Anyways, the presentations from the OPAG Spring Meeting are finally online. Yes, Hell has frozen over. Or maybe that was Europa. Wait, that's redundant, scratch that... I kid, I kid. NASA's Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) held their spring meeting in Bethesda, Maryland last month and we have been waiting for the presentations to get posted online. Not just me, but Van over at Future Planetary Exploration has been waiting.

Two presentations caught my eye. The first is by my advisor, Alfred McEwen, and covers the Io Volcano Observer. This presentation covers much of the same terrain that we saw in the presentation given in December at the Io Workshop, but it also goes into further details over a possible tour plan and the science goals. The example tour presented includes some info about how the IVO team might plan the mission. The sample tour includes no flybys with altitudes less than 291 km in altitude, but the previous slides does point out that the do plan to try closer encounters, down to 100 km, later in the nominal mission and extended mission. Closer encounters are particularly important in order to observe small scale features on the surface (like skylights) and to use the mass spectrometer within an active plume. The sample mission assumes a different launch from the nominal January 2015 one, so again, take the sample tour with a grain of salt. Still, it would seem that the tour designers want to keep the sunlit region on Io during the flybys fairly similar, but not so similar that only half the surface would ever be visible during these encounters.

The IVO presentation also concentrates on the science objectives for the mission. These mission objectives largely cover those proposed for the Io Observer mission type available for the New Frontiers-3 announcement of opportunity (but all but impossible because NF-3 can't use radioisotope power sources). These science goals include (level 1 goals in bold):

• Understanding the eruption mechanisms for Io's lavas and plumes and how these compare to similar processes on Earth and other terrestrial planets
• Determining Io's interior structure, particularly the melt fraction of the mantle
• Determining the properties and mechanisms of Io's tidal heating and implications for the orbital evolution of Io and Europa
• Investigating the processes that form Io's mountains and other tectonic structures in the satellite's high heat flow environment
• Understanding Io's atmosphere and ionosphere and their connection to Io's volcanism
• Determining whether Io has a magnetic field
• Understanding Io's surface chemistry, including volatiles and silicates
• Improving our understanding of Jupiter system science

The IVO team feels that this mission along with the Jupiter Europa Mission, would go along way toward responding toward these goals, though many require a high data rate as a result of the fast encounters, so a large amount of data storage will be needed (~20 Gb) in order to capture all the close approach data, particularly from INMS and RCam. McEwen also stresses the synergy between JEO and IVO, making it clear that even with the Europa/Jupiter System Mission having been selected, the Io Volcano Observer will still be needed by the Io community, as it provides much more information about the polar regions, particuarly the heat flow up there, and would provide much more data on the composition of Io's lavas. Finally, IVO would help to mitigate EJSM's risk by testing the ASRG, the next generation of radioisotope power source to be used by IVO, if EJSM uses them as well.

Curt Niebur gave a presentation on the results of the Outer Planets Flagship Mission selection process. Niebur goes into detail the rationale behind the Selection Panel's decision to give higher priority to the Europa/Jupiter System mission for the next decade flagship mission. Basically, as has already been reported, the EJSM concept was seen as been more technically mature, the result of several prior mission studies over the last decade for a Europa follow-on mission to Galileo. Niebur notes several issues with the Titan concept, but the technical review basically noted that technical issues and design drivers many of the mission elements, such as the SEP stage development, the thermal subsystem, the integration of the in situ elements, and aerobreaking where not realistically reflected in the budget estimate.

Link: OPAG Spring Meeting Presentations [www.lpi.usra.edu]

LPSC Io Poster Session Tonight

The Io poster session at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference is tonight! Unfortunately, I'm not there, I'm here in Tucson. I am sure most you are not there either, but if you are, you have no excuse after visiting a blog about Io for not visiting the lonely Io posters, more than likely shoved in some deep dark corner, where most people would fear to tread. LPSC this year is at a new venue so I am not sure how the layout is, but all the years I was at LPSC, Io and the other Galileans were off along the far wall of the gymnasium the poster session was held in.

For those who need a refresher on what is being presented this year, I posted summaries of the abstracts last month:

• Volcanism on Io: Insights from Global Geologic Mapping by Dave Williams et al. The blog post covering this abstract is located here.
• Geologic Mapping of the Hi'iaka and Shamshu Regions of Io by Bunte et al. The blog post covering this abstract is located here.
• Classification of Io's Paterae: Active vs Inactive by Barth, Radebaugh, and Christiansen. The blog post covering this abstract is located here.
• Ionian Volcanoes Reveal Their Temperatures by Allen and Radebaugh. The blog post covering this abstract is located here.
• Optimal Wavelengths for Studying Thermal Emission from Active Volcanoes on Io by Keszthelyi, Davies, and McEwen. The blog post covering this abstract is located here.
• Ground-Based Observations of Io in Support of the New Horizons Flyby by Rathbun and Spencer. The blog post covering this abstract is located here.
• Argus: A New Frontiers mission to observe Io by Borer et al. The blog post covering this abstract is located here.
• DSMC Modeling of 3D Vent Geometries for Ionian Plumes by McDoniel et al. The blog post covering this abstract is located here.
  
• Io Volcano Observer (IVO) by McEwen et al. The blog post covering this abstract is located here.

The IVO poster will presented during the next poster session on Thursday.

Cosmos on Hulu and Io from Australia

The 1980 television series, Cosmos, is now available on Hulu in its entirety. The series, hosted by Carl Sagan, was a landmark series for its time, introducing many Americans and people around the world to the wonders of astronomy and planetary science. The videos are only available to people in the US, though I am sure there are proxy servers for non-US people to get around that, but you may have an easier time getting series off of iTunes. To be honest though, Cosmos never influenced me as greatly as it has many other people. In fact, I never even saw an episode of it until I watched the Jupiter/Saturn episode, Travelers' Tales yesterday. What I found most interesting was the part where Sagan is sitting down with Larry Soderblom, discussing dark spots on Europa and whether certain features were impact craters or potential geyser sites. Nice to see Sagan break character a bit ;-)

The shows are updated at the end with some info on results from the 1980s, though some of the graphics have definitely been updated as recently as the late 1990s (the Galileo images of Europa kinda give that away). Still definitely worth checking out at least as a reminder of how far this field has come in the last 30 years.

In completely unrelated news, astronomers in the Philippines and Australia continue to turn their telescopes to Jupiter now that the planet is moving further and further from the Sun from Earth's perspective. Anthony Wesley captured a great view on March 21 of Jupiter with Io transiting across the giant planet. Io is the faint orange spot to the left of the dark spot near the center of Jupiter's disk. Io's shadow is the dark spot further to the left.

Tip of the hat to Phil Plait.

Link: Cosmos on Hulu [www.hulu.com]

The Galilean Satellites from STEREO

One of the two STEREO spacecraft, the one trailing Earth, captured this view of a coronal mass ejection from the Sun as well as Jupiter and its four Galilean satellites. Io is the one closest to Jupiter on its left. The planet and its four largest moons crossed the coronagraph's field of view over a period of 30 hours on March 15-16, 2009. In addition to this still image, the team also released a movie of images acquired by STEREO-A's coronagraph. This instrument is designed to look at the Sun's outer atmosphere, looking for changes in the charged particles in the corona, such as from coronal mass ejections like the one that occurred during this observation.

While the caption states that, "No one has been able to observe Jupiter and its moons for some time," that has been changing over the last few days. Anthony Wesley captured a great view of the giant planet yesterday, observing the hemisphere that includes the Great Red Spot. Like Red Spot Jr. (Oval BA), the Great Red Spot seems to be quite pale in color compared to other reddish cloud bands. Compare with images acquired the day before of Oval BA.

Link: STEREO - Jupiter and Galilean moons observed [stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov]

Mission Madness

Okay, I've been telling myself that I wouldn't post about this, then I found the trash talking thread, and finally I got my blood up. The NASA EDGE podcast team have been hosting a spaceflight version of March Madness called Mission Madness. Similar to the college basketball March Madness, you can fill out a bracket consisting initially of 64 human and robotic missions with 32 match-ups. You can select which mission you think is better in those 32, first-round matchups. Every few days, the next round begins with match-ups being filled by the winners of previous round, until you reach the final four missions in early April. The voting has begun for the first round of matchups, so don't forget to vote.

There has been quite a bit of ranting about missions that were excluded from the bracket in the thread I linked to above. The only two missions I would have liked to see included but weren't would be Galileo and STS-61 (the first Hubble servicing mission). There is also a relative lack of Earth science missions. This could have been resolved, IMHO, by replacing the unflown missions like Ares-1, ORION, and JWST with some of these "missing missions".

Not to influence you too much, but my final four is Apollo 11, Vikings I & II, MER, and Voyager 1 & 2, with Apollo 11 beating Voyager 1 & 2 in the championship.

So far in the first round of voting, the votes are following the bracket I filled out with a few exceptions I want to make known (so you can vote for my picks, thus making me look like a genius). First off, SPB (a balloon mission) is currently leading over the Mars Rovers? WTF?!? I call shenanigans! A few closer matchups that aren't going my way at the moment: LCROSS is leading over MRO, NB-52 is leading over L.P. 1, Bell X-1 is leading over THEMIS, and SR-71 is leading over Friendship 7.

For the record, my college basketball final four is Kansas, Memphis, Pittsburgh, and Gonzaga, with Memphis beating Pittsburgh in the championship game. Of course, as I write this, my winner, Memphis, is currently losing in their first round game to Cal State-Northridge... I used to be good at picking these. I was in the top 20 in the Facebook bracket tournament going into last year's championship game, but I ended up picking the loser of that game. And to people in North Carolina, I'm sorry I picked Gonzaga over you guys. I actually met and talked with Roy Williams, UNC's coach, back when he was the head coach at KU. He was a frequent visitor to my high school when he was recruiting one of the players on my school's team.

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption in Tonga

While Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai would be a great name for a volcano on Io, I am actually referring to the undersea volcano in the South Pacific island nation of Tonga. This seamount erupted yesterday producing a large steam and pyroclastic cloud reaching at least 15,000 feet into the air. The BBC has a video captured on a boat a few miles from the eruption site. The video clearly makes out the brighter steam and darker pyroclastic clouds. The large size of the eruption column is leading to disruption of Air New Zealand flights.

You can follow news about this eruption over at the Volcanism Blog, a great site to learn more about volcanic activity on Earth.

The closest analog to this eruption on Io would be an explosive eruption west of Zal Patera during the summer of 1997. Almost no lava was deposited during the eruption (within the limits of resolution and the annoying noise hits of our best images of the area), but there is evidence for an SO₂ dust plume (analogous with the bright steam cloud seen at this Tongan eruption) and pyroclastics that produced a dark deposit that radiates out from the central vent (analogous to the dark cloud seen in the video linked above). Akin to sulfur dioxide plumes on Io, the steam cloud is produced as heat from the eruption boils off the water above the source vent. On Io, this "boiling off" normally occurs when lava flows over SO₂ frost on the surface. The pyroclastic eruption at "At'am" would act remarkably like the pyroclastic flow here (though it would look less like a cloud, I would presume). There would be an initial ballistic phase as the largest clasts get sorted out. After a few kilometers, the pyroclastic column, consisting mostly of ash with low volatile contents, would collapse and move rapidly laterally along the surface. As can be seen at "At'am", the rapid speed of the pyroclastic surge allows it to climb up shallow slopes even on the 2 kilometer tall plateau, North Zal Montes.

Pyroclastic flows on Io were modeled by Smythe et al. back in 2001.

Cool New Images of Jupiter and Saturn

With Saturn high in the sky nowadays and Jupiter finally starting to rise out of the muck in the morning sky here on Earth, some great astrophotography is being taken of these two planets. The big news of day was the release of a series of images acquired last month by the Hubble Space Telescope of a quadruple moon transit at Saturn. In the image at right, Enceladus, Dione, Titan, and Mimas (from left to right) can be seen cross the disk of Saturn. What is great about this shot is that it makes it clear just how large Titan is compared to these other moons of Saturn and just how much Saturn dwarfs Titan. Other images taken in this series show the shadow of Titan on the cloudtops of Saturn. Finally, the Hubble team released a video of these images put together. Very sweet stuff.

Saturn isn't the only large planet being looked at. Jupiter, as reported yesterday, is still pretty low in the sky in the morning, but that isn't stopping Christopher Go and Tomio Akutsu, both in the Philippines, from imaging it. From images taken on March 16, there are hints that the reddish coloration of Oval BA, nicknamed the Red Spot Jr., maybe fading, perhaps reverting back to its whitish appearance it had before 2006. Both observations seem to suggest that Jupiter seems less stormy at the moment. Mike Salway and Anthony Wesley also captured a few nice views of Jupiter on March 17.

In other news, the presentations from last week's OPAG meeting are still not online. Brian, the fruit bat who decided to take a nap on the space shuttle Discovery's external tank, didn't make it. Let us have a moment of silence for the little guy. Though wait, if he is in the big orange grove in the sky, what is he doing still tweeting? Finally, the San Diego Union-Tribune has an article on Europa and Titan and their chances for life.

YouTube Videos of Galileo Flybys of Io

A couple of weeks ago, I uploaded a video showing an animation of Voyager 1's encounter with Io. I have gone ahead and uploaded animations showing the seven flybys Galileo made of Io between 1995 and 2002. These were created using Celestia, a 3D space simulation program that supports user-created add-ons. This is great because it is easy to modify the program to suit your needs, whether you want to create science fiction/fantasy worlds in a galaxy far, far away or model spaceflight events closer to home. I've modified my installed version so that it uses NAIF Spice kernels to produce accurate position information for all the planets and satellites in the solar system and many space probes, such as Galileo, Cassini, both Voyagers, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MESSENGER, Dawn, and Pioneer 10 and 11. I have also modified it to include a high-resolution basemaps for Io and many other planets and moons. Here are the links to those videos on Youtube, plus an embedded version of the I33 video below.

• I0 - December 7, 1995
• I24 - October 11, 1999
• I25 - November 26, 1999
• I27 - February 22, 2000
• I31 - August 6, 2001
• I32 - October 16, 2001
• I33 - January 16, 2002

In a few other quick notes, the presentations from last week's OPAG meeting still haven't been posted online, in case you are waiting for me to discuss them. As soon as they are, I will let you know here.

Astrophotography of Jupiter and its moons certainly have died down in recent months due to January's conjunction, when Jupiter was on the other side of the Sun from Earth, making it difficult to observe because Jupiter's been so close to the Sun. However, over the last few weeks, Jupiter has been reaching higher and higher in the sky, making it more visible in the morning sky. Tomio Akutsu in the Philippines captured a great view of Jupiter on March 7, also showing that Io is in fact, still in existence (in case there were any skeptics out there ;-)

Cannibalistic Jupiter

Recently I wrote a quick note on some research conducted by Robin Canup and William Ward that suggested that Jupiter "ate" many of the early generations of satellites that formed around it. After some digging, I found the paper these press articles were based on. The two researchers from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado wrote a chapter in the upcoming Europa book to be published by the University of Arizona press titled, "The Origin of Europa and the Galilean Satellites." A pre-print is available at arXiv.org.

For the last few years, Canup and Ward have modeled the formation of Jupiter and the Galilean satellites. They believe that Jupiter and other gas giants like Saturn for more like stars than terrestrial worlds like Earth. Jupiter formed in a mini-nebula within the fledgling solar nebular 4.5 billion years. This mini-nebula began to spin and slowly collapsed, forming an inner core that would become Jupiter and a disk of gas and dust around its equator. Moons accreted from this disk of material, much like the terrestrial planets accreted in the inner solar system.

However, the two had a problem with their model. To form an appropriately sized Jupiter, they required an initial disk of material that contained around 10% of Jupiter's mass. This was reasonable, except the Galilean satellites contain around 2% of Jupiter's mass. Where did the other 8% go? They resolve this by modeling the formation of earlier generations of moons, which formed to a maximum size of Ganymede before it stopped accreting dust. However, these moons would slowly be dragged down toward newborn Jupiter by gas drag within the Jovian nebula. Eventually, these moons would be dragged all the way into Jupiter. The amount of material in the disk could have supported the formation of 20 large satellites, Europa to Ganymede-sized, mostly consisting of rock since the early disk would be too hot to allow for the condensation of water. Eventually, the disk would cool down, allowing water to condense. At the same time, gas inflow from the solar nebula had also stopped. This helps clear out much of the gas in the disk, putting a stop to the inward migration of the satellites at that time. The satellites that survived this cannibalistic stage are the moons we know today as the Galilean moons.

They also note a few other implications of their gas accretion model. For example, their late formation of the Galilean satellites, about 5 million years after the formation of calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, is consistent with water-rich Ganymede and Callisto, water-glazed Europa, and nearly water-free Io. Their long formation times, 100,000 to 1 million years as the result of slower material inflow from the solar nebula, would also support the accretion of water-rich material on the outer moons and most of the accreted material would have come in the form of small impactors, in the range of 1 km across. Finally, the migration of Jupiter satellites, particularly Ganymede, during their formation could have led to the development of the Laplace resonance that has led to tidal heating on Io and Europa.

It should be noted that this process may have also occurred at Saturn, though only one large moon seems to have survived, with many smaller moons left behind as well. So yes, Goya's painting, "Saturn Devouring his Son" is appropriate here.

Link: Origin of Europa and the Galilean Satellites [arxiv.org]

Carnival of Space #94 @ Out of the Cradle

Ken Murphy over the blog Out of the Cradle is hosting this week's Carnival of Space, the 94th Edition. This week, learn more about HiRISE images of Mars' moon Deimos, the recently launched Kepler mission, and plans in the 1960s for planetary exploration in the 1970s. Well worth checking out!

Link: The 94th Carnival of Space - Out of the Cradle [www.outofthecradle.net]

Naked Science: Journey to Jupiter Follow-up

So yesterday, I reminded all of you to check out the National Geographic Channel show Naked Science, which had a new episode last night titled, "Journey to Jupiter". The show covered results from the Galileo mission at Jupiter and how unanswered questions from that mission have led to a host of new missions planned for the giant planet.

Overall, I thought the show was quite decent, if a bit uneven in its coverage. I thought the first half of the show covering the planet itself was excellent. The show presented several mysteries regarding Jupiter, its origins, and how it fits in with the formation and evolution of the solar system. These include the Galileo probe results which have led to the theory that Jupiter has migrated inward from the outer solar system, Shoemaker-Levy 9 observations that provided evidence for the amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere (which the Galileo probe failed to obtain because it flew through an abnormal dry hotspot), and cloud tracking results which show how large storms evolve and persist on Jupiter. The episode also showed how lingering questions from the areas of interest have led to the development of Juno, a mission scheduled for launch in 2011. Again, the show's producers did a great job with Jupiter, in my opinion. However, since I am less familiar with gas planet research in general, I may not be in the best position to judge that parts effectiveness.

The second half of the episode was dedicated to Jupiter's four largest moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. During this part, I felt the show faultered a bit. No, I am not criticising it for only dedicating 4 or 5 minutes, at best, to Io, and 15 minutes to Europa. I accept the fact that Europa may generate more interest from shows such as this, and I am not going to criticise them for the editorial choice on how much to time to give each moon. However, I felt that the style of coverage, presenting a few new results from Galileo and looking at remaining mysteries, didn't carry over as well from the Jupiter half of the show to the satellite part, particularly the Io section. What do we learn instead from the Io section: Io has active volcanism (a surprise!) and that it is powered by tidal flexing of the moon's interior. Okay, but what about the results from Galileo? Surely, there were new results from Galileo or other aspects of Io that could be touched on briefly. Sulfur vs. silcates? High-temperature volcanism? Maybe the radiation effects on Galileo? Nothing. Io has active volcanism and it is powered by tidal flexing. Ganymede and Callisto faired a bit better, with a brief discussion of the results regarding their interiors and Ganymede's magnetic field.

The last 15 minutes of the show were dedicated to Europa. Fine, okay, I think I can live if Europa gets her moment in the Sun. I think the biggest issue with the section may not be the producers' fault, the show was clearly completed well before the flagship downselection, but the show did spend some time discussing what a Europa orbiter would accomplish. I am a bit envious that Bob P. got to play around with huge blocks of ice (while two guys in the background tried to pretend there wasn't a film crew in their lab, from experience, 10 bucks they are pretending to work so they get to be in the shot). In my turn at being interviewed for on of these types of programs, all I got to do was point at a map or point at a computer screen (or be one of those people in the background pretending to work). Anyways, the Europa section does do a decent job in presenting the geological finding of Galileo, then it delves into astrobiology. Say it with me children, "Water DOES NOT EQUAL life." Now, keep saying that until you get it. I swear, it is like nails to a chalkboard whenever someone implies that. True, they did touch on the fact that Europa might have accessible raw materials that would be needed for native life. So I give them kudos for that (they even mentioned CO2, good on them). Now with that being said, the end of the show does present us with a potential future mission to Europa, a sub-surface submarine, by looking at a prototype being used on Earth. It presents the issues with such a mission, such as the need for autonomy and the heat source required for the sub to tunnel its way down through Europa's ice shell. Still, it would have been better, I think, for the show to stick with missions that are in the reasonable near-future.

This new episode of Naked Science covering Jupiter and its moons clearly focused on the planet itself and Europa. Jovian science was well-presented from this outsiders perspective, but more care could have been done to present some of the on-going mysteries about the satellites, particularly Io, where I felt too much time was spent explaining just the basics of tidal heating.