NASA's Juno mission leaves legacy of science at Jupiter(scientificamerican.com) |
NASA's Juno mission leaves legacy of science at Jupiter(scientificamerican.com) |
Combine that with the fact that the Juno probe has now more than doubled its expected life, and this whole mission serves as as good of an argument for continuing to fund NASA as you’re going to see.
Now I feel the urge to dispute this!
1: https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-probe-could-intercept-inte...
Referring to their figs. 3–7, that distance figure is a hard limit—there's no possibility they have of getting closer to the comet than that.
(Keep in mind this is just one random interstellar comet; there are many, many others like it—there will be infinite opportunities to study one—and Avi Loeb is a proven clown who consistently misrepresents these things for drama).
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21402 ("Intercepting 3I/ATLAS at Closest Approach to Jupiter with the Juno spacecraft")
Tangential remark: there was a similar proposal for the end-of-life of the Cassini orbiter—it didn't happen, but, there was enough delta-v for the theoretical option, of escaping Saturn and redirecting it to a second mission at Uranus[1]. It was also a dodgy idea, since the transfer time would have been ridiculous (~20 years)—it'd have been a long-shot for Cassini to have survived that long.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini_retirement#End_of_miss... ("Cassini retirement#End of mission options")
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Loeb
I don't think considering his proposal might have damaged NASA's reputation. I also don't think the interstellar object is an alien probe, I just was excited we got a chance at looking at an interstellar object, that may be totally unlike Solar System objects, and possibly far older. Crap?
It also happens that NASA is too busy doing damage control to consider anything new. But even if they were, it won't be because Loeb suggested it.
What I don't understand on his Wikipedia page is this bit in the second sentence: "Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University". Does he work there under the alias "Frank B. Baird Jr." or what does this sentence mean? Or is the position called one person but another person fulfills the role?
source > bloviating
>But even if they were, it won't be because Loeb suggested it.
Wow, what an utter arbitrarily position-hedging comment
It is worth noting that this comes two weeks after the authors posted https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12213 "Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?"
They describe this first paper as "largely a pedagogical exercise" - clearly, if they're now providing emails to news outlets recommending this course change, their view of the target audience has certainly evolved. Orson Welles would be proud.
Juno's mission is at end-of-life at the proposal's starting point. So now tell me again about the risks.
And even the 27Mkm number requires very optimistic assumptions, including that the main engine that has had huge problems during its mission would work perfectly for one continuous burn to exhaustion. Realistically, that's not going to happen.
There's one image on the NASA page and others. Any more links?
As for Loeb himself, I'm only passingly familiar with him in passing because of coverage since ‘Oumuamua, but it seems like he is a fairly typical asgtrophysicist who decided for some reason that he would launch a crusade declaring anything entering the Solar System from interstellar space must be an alien probe or spaceship.