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Skimming gas giants

HG_B said:
They try to protect internal electronics. There is no "protection" available to prevent it from striking the plane in the 1st place. It is a common occurrence.
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Understood; that wasn't what I was trying to say. The Boeing link seemed to imply protective measures to control where the lightning hit and where it went when it hit, protecting certain pieces of externally exposed equipment from the effect. The "legacy" metal airplanes seem to be better able to handle lightning strikes; the composite ones appear to be taking significant damage to the skin.

An interesting question is how superdense armor handles electric current. Not that it's at any risk, but I wonder if it's more conductive as a result of that superdense structure.
 
As far as lightening strikes go the type of amps in a typical lightening strike, I've been informed via a PBS documentary, is between 20000 and 80000 amps. Wow. But that's on Earth. A jovian lightening arc is quite bit more powerful, but I can't find any figures on them.

On the EMF, we live in the most intense EMF of them all, the Earth's magnetic field. I'm curious how it is that a gas giant EMF becomes deadly to humans.
 
Blue Ghost said:
As far as lightening strikes go the type of amps in a typical lightening strike, I've been informed via a PBS documentary, is between 20000 and 80000 amps. Wow. But that's on Earth. A jovian lightening arc is quite bit more powerful, but I can't find any figures on them.
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If you get hit by Jovian lightening, you are already in deep trouble as you are WAY too deep in the atmosphere for skimming.
 
HG_B said:
They try to protect internal electronics. There is no "protection" available to prevent it from striking the plane in the 1st place. It is a common occurrence.
Click to expand...

It's kind of cool to watch from the inside, too... Usually, providing that the electronics are properly installed, it's a non-issue for metal bodied planes.
 
aramis said:
It's kind of cool to watch from the inside, too... Usually, providing that the electronics are properly installed, it's a non-issue for metal bodied planes.
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Yep. Watched it on a flight to Atlanta one summer. A strike on the wing. Blinded me for a moment.
 
Radiation, we're talking about alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons? The radiation that gets trapped in a magnetic field, that's alpha and beta, no? Alpha and beta aren't going to penetrate a hull, are they?

Traveller hull is equivalent to about a foot of steel, that's like 5 inches of lead, reducing gamma and neutron radiation to ~1/4096. Is a gas giant going to emit enough to endanger someone inside that?

Jovian magnetic field's about ten times stronger than Earth's, but that's still small change compared to what our medical equipment can do.

Occurs to me that these ships are going to need to be subjected to a nuclear damper occasionally.

What am I missing?
 
HG_B said:
If you get hit by Jovian lightening, you are already in deep trouble as you are WAY too deep in the atmosphere for skimming.
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Which is kind of why I want to find out more about them :devil:

There's just so little data on Jupiter. It's kind of frustrating.
 
Carlobrand said:
Radiation, we're talking about alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons? The radiation that gets trapped in a magnetic field, that's alpha and beta, no? Alpha and beta aren't going to penetrate a hull, are they?

Traveller hull is equivalent to about a foot of steel, that's like 5 inches of lead, reducing gamma and neutron radiation to ~1/4096. Is a gas giant going to emit enough to endanger someone inside that?

Jovian magnetic field's about ten times stronger than Earth's, but that's still small change compared to what our medical equipment can do.

Occurs to me that these ships are going to need to be subjected to a nuclear damper occasionally.

What am I missing?
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One of the jovian experts in a History channel doc special stated that the EMF field enough to kill a human being. I've heard that from couple of other people, but I have my doubts. If the field were that interactive with matter, then would it not manifest itself on the moons and in the atmosphere of Jupiter itself?
 
Blue Ghost said:
If the field were that interactive with matter, then would it not manifest itself on the moons and in the atmosphere of Jupiter itself?
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I'm not sure we can see it from here. And anything passing between the planet and it's moons would probably be invisible. What we see when we see lightning on Earth is heated plasma created from the atmosphere.

Here's a cool video about the storms on Jupiter.

http://youtu.be/GRst061YTVU

And another about a mission to study the storms.

http://youtu.be/LUV0tA-R3aE
 
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I guess what I mean is that if it did something odd to volatile liquids or reactive compounds, then would we see stuff happening on Io, Europa, Ganymede and so forth? When Voyager passed by (Voyager 2?), I don't recall any special effort to slap on extra shielding and what not for its flyby of Jupiter. Or do I have that wrong?
 
Spinward Scout said:
I'm not sure we can see it from here. And anything passing between the planet and it's moons would probably be invisible. What we see when we see lightning on Earth is heated plasma created from the atmosphere.

Here's a cool video about the storms on Jupiter.

http://youtu.be/GRst061YTVU

And another about a mission to study the storms.

http://youtu.be/LUV0tA-R3aE
Click to expand...

Believe it or not, I just watched those last night. Excellent stuff, but still no data on the strength of her EMF or the voltage or amperage of its lightening.
 
Blue Ghost said:
When Voyager passed by (Voyager 2?), I don't recall any special effort to slap on extra shielding and what not for its flyby of Jupiter. Or do I have that wrong?
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The precursor probes Pioneer 10 & 11 were 'first in' as no one really had more than a vague idea what to expect. When they got the data back, they found out the radiation was about 10 times higher than the Pioneer/Voyager designers had expected it to be.

As such, they had to redesign the Voyager craft (which had more sensetive instruments) to cope with the Rad levels encountered.
 
As NASA’s Cassini spacecraft approached Saturn last July (2004) it found evidence that lightning on Saturn is roughly one million times stronger than lightning on Earth. “That’s just astonishing to me!” said University of Iowa Space Physicist Don Gurnett, who notes that some radio signals have been linked to storm systems observed by the Cassini imaging instrument.
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http://www.holoscience.com/wp/megalightning-at-saturn/

That is orders of magnitude higher than Jupiter!
 
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Other than getting way down into the lightening (low into the atmosphere) nothing (other than the flux tube) is going to bother your ship.
 
Blue Ghost said:
Which is kind of why I want to find out more about them :devil:

There's just so little data on Jupiter. It's kind of frustrating.
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Well, that probably won't change much till the Juno mission spacecraft arrival some 3 years from now! See: http://missionjuno.swri.edu/

Got to hold one of the actual flight instruments in my grubby little paws (well, gloved in a clean room) before it departed. :D

There was lots of specialized shielding and fabrication involved in the Juno probe due exclusively to the extreme environment - dad spent weeks designing and precisely fitting exotic metal interlocking shielding plates in the instrument he fabbed - which was not a requirement for the similar instruments he had made for Cassini, New Horizons, Rosetta, nor LRO missions. The coatings and conductor routing on the Juno mission are also unique - and yet the mission life is still expected to be shortened appreciably. I was involved in several discussions with the design team of a very large Faraday cage for one of the test chambers that had to be specially constructed.

As for direct lethality of EMF - that is something on the order of a billion G (Gauss), IIRC - so no, not from Jupiter. However, the indirect effect of Jupiter's strong rotating magnetic field certainly creates an environment quite lethal to humans without extensive protection.
 
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