‘Oddball’ among 12 new moons discovered around Jupiter

Supersonic flights ‘harmful’ Google boils down H2O data for a new UN site

TEPIC, Mexico, July 17, (RTRS): Vast quantities of raw satellite imagery and data will be distilled into an online platform showing how water ecosystems have changed, and how countries can manage them to prevent further loss, said Google and the United Nations.

Focusing initially on fresh water ecosystems such as rivers and forests, Google will produce geospatial maps and data for a publicly available platform to be launched in October in partnership with the UN Environment Program (UNEP).

“It’s basically a time slide ... you can go back in time, and what is does is show you where water has disappeared,” said Elisabeth Mullin Bernhardt, a programme manager at UNEP, on Monday. “It can show you where water never was and now is there. It can show you where water is seasonal.”

For Africa’s Lake Chad, for example, access to comprehensive data and images showing surrounding land and rivers could help explain why the lake, on which so many depend, is drying up so quickly, said Kenya-based Bernhardt.

Given that most countries share water sources, the information could also be used to encourage neighbouring nations to work together on strategies to manage rivers or lakes, she said.

Google is using artificial intelligence and cloud computing to process a massive amount of satellite imagery and data, stretching back over three decades, before it can be analysed, said Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth and Earth Engine.

“Much of the world does not have access to good data about the state of their forests, their rivers and lakes and coastal eco-systems and how they’ve been changing over time,” Moore told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone.

“It’s a critically important time because there are dramatic changes going on, due to climate change and urbanisation and a number of factors that are in some cases significantly depleting fresh water supply.”

Improved information could lead to better investment in environmental services as countries try to meet their Sustainable Development Goals, said UNEP.

Agreed at the UN in 2015, the 17 global goals include targets to end poverty and hunger, combat climate change, and provide universal access to water and sanitation by 2030.

Governments are currently reviewing progress on the goals at UN headquarters in New York, where UNEP and Google announced the satellite initiative.

While researchers will focus on water ecosystems, the platform could be expanded to include issues such as desertification or plastics in the world’s oceans, said Bernhardt.

Bernhardt

This April 3, 2017 image made available by NASA shows the planet Jupiter. (AP) A dozen new moons have been discovered around Jupiter, bringing its total number of known moons to 79, the most of any planet in our solar system, astronomers announced Tuesday.

One of the new moons was described as a “real oddball” by researcher Scott Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution for Science, because of its tiny size, it measuring just about a half-mile (one kilometer) across.

It also “has an orbit like no other known Jovian moon” and is “likely Jupiter’s smallest known moon,” he added.

This oddball takes about a year and a half to circle Jupiter, and orbits at an inclined angle that crosses paths with a swarm of moons traveling in a retrograde, or in the opposite direction of Jupiter’s spin rotation. “This is an unstable situation,” said Sheppard. “Head-on collisions would quickly break apart and grind the objects down to dust.”

The oddball moon, along with two other new moon discoveries, orbit in the prograde, or same direction as the planet’s rotation.

The inner moons take about a year to circle Jupiter, while the outer moons take twice as long.

All the moons may be fragments that broke apart when their larger, parent cosmic bodies collided. (AFP)