Jupiter serves up just what the students ordered
GALILEO: Inland kids look for an energy jump after the craft plunges into the atmosphere. They get it.By DARRELL R. SANTSCHI / The Press-Enterprise
APPLE VALLEY - Sixteen-year-old Keith Kucera came to school Sunday to "learn the basics of our world." Fifteen-year-old Joey Bean came "because they were going to crash something into a planet. Big explosions are cool." And 11-year-old Zack Lynch came because "I like space and I wondered where my tax dollars are going."
They each got a taste of what they wanted, pointing a 34-meter radio telescope at Jupiter to take the planet's temperature as the spacecraft Galileo plunged to destruction in the atmosphere.
The youngsters study astronomy at the Lewis Center for Educational Research, a charter school in Apple Valley that, via the Internet, operates a massive radio telescope at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex at Fort Irwin.
Eight of the students played a part in history on Sunday: collecting data that will be processed by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena.
Several of Goldstone's radio telescopes were collecting telemetry from Galileo in its death throes. The kids, meanwhile, focused on the radiation belt that wraps around Jupiter.
They were looking for a spike in the planet's temperature; a hint that changes in temperature occur during such an event. They got it.
Numbers indicating energy emitted by the planet jumped 10-fold on the highly sensitive telescope, Lynch said." That means a change in temperature," he said. The temperature changes are "really minor."" If they were happening here, you wouldn't even feel it," he said.
Scientists will spend the next few months interpreting the data, made all the more curious by an unexplained spike in readings from Jupiter that occurred earlier this summer.
Sunday's event was intentional. Galileo, launched 14 years ago to explore Jupiter and its moons, was running out of fuel. NASA ordered it to dive into the atmosphere to collect information about Jupiter and to prevent the spacecraft from crashing into one of Jupiter's moons, Europa.
Galileo's nose dive occurred just before noon, well before the kids arrived at the Lewis Center. They weren't needed until 52 minutes after the event, when inaudible radio signals had completed the 580-million-mile journey from the planet to their telescope.
" We're probably going to show it to my dad on the Internet," Kucera said.
When they finished their work in mid-afternoon, the Apple Valley students handed off control of the telescope to youngsters in Moreno Valley at Northridge Elementary School, who continued taking temperature readings.
Reach Darrell R. Santschi at (909) 806-3067 or dsantschi@pe.com
Used with permission by The Press-Enterprise, 2003