Did NASA Accidentally “Nuke” Jupiter?

The Enterprise Mission ^ | 11/6/2003 | Richard C. Hoagland

[Hunble]

The term: Popcorn-fart comes to mind.

Get serious!

[Faith65]

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[Poohbah]

And just where did this retard get his degree ..... the nuclear batteries are U-238, NOT 235 and not plutonium.

Actually, they ARE plutonium.

But the idea that there's enough oomph there to create a runaway burn a la Teller's "Classical Super" is downright silly. There's a reason that the Classical Super wouldn't work: the device would radiate away the heat of the nuclear blast before it could raise the thermonuclear fuel to the ignition point.

[Centurion2000]

Actually I take my previous post back .... this is fascinating ..... and I hope we do light off Jupiter as a second mini sun .... we get 4 more terrestrial planets to play with.

[WillRain]

bump for later reading

[r9etb]

And just where did this retard get his degree ..... the nuclear batteries are U-238, NOT 235 and not plutonium.

Actually, they're PLUTONIUM-238. See here for facts about Galileo's RTGs.

As for the "implosion" thing -- it's completely bogus. A plutonium bomb requires very precise compression, and very high implosion speeds. Atmospheric crushing would be uneven, and very slow.

[dead]

Hoagland is a lunatic. Lunatics are common, but there's a tiny handful that have, at some point, a credible resume. They're the worst kind of kooks. Those guys can really make some money peddling books and such, though.

I didn’t get the impression that he really believed that this happened. He was just trying to imagine a way that Galileo could possibly have caused this spot, no matter how unlikely.

I think it was just a harmless mental excersize.

[bagman]

This sounds like a crock of Jovian doo-doo.

Pu-238 is not Pu-239. The triggering of a nuclear explosion is extremely delicate. The nuclear material must be of sufficient mass in the proper geometry, and a source of neutrons must be present at precisely the correct instance. I see no reason to believe that any of the above conditions were met. I think that a fission explosion can be easily ruled out.

But, suppose I am wrong (hey, it happens). How do we proceed to a thermonuclear (fusion) explosion? It is extremely hard to do so. It took the USA over five years after World War II to figure out how to do it. Postulating a fission explosion in the Jovian atmosphere, what happens? Well, the surrounding gas is heated, expands, and the energy is dissipated well before there is a fusion reaction.

In short, this speculation is balderdash and whimsey.

[Centurion2000]

oops .... missed that in the details ..... but Fermi had a bet that the same bomb type would ignite our atmosphere ... and that didn't happen.

[TastyManatees]

Nuke the Moon!

[dljordan]

So, by describing him as a lunatic and kook it's easy to dismiss anything he says rather than having to refute his purported facts. He may be trying to make money from such speculation but I don't think he's a "KOOK".

[beezdotcom]

This strikes me as tinfoil hat nonsense...especially when considering that the impacts of the Shoemaker-Levy comet fragments easily delivered over 20 times the wallop of the Galileo collision and even that didn't start a thermonuclear chain reaction.

Well, a comet isn't made of potentially fissionable material...but I digress. Hoagland is a kook-and-a-half, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. It at least bears a little additional fact-checking.

I, for one, would like to know if the "dark spot" in question was truly being ignored...or was it just another photographic artifact that Hoagland has chosen to hype....guess I better do a little digging.

[Chi-townChief]

No wonder they hate us!!!

[Kirkwood]

Very entertaining "what-if" scenario until that ridiculous astronomer-conspiracy nonsense. Yeesh!

[sticker]

Wasn't Hoagland involved with something about a spaceship or something in AZ, but nobody could see because the gov't or the space aliens caused it to snow or some such BS

[dljordan]

I read his book "Behold a Pale Horse". He said the government was trying to kill him the crazy guy. He was so paranoid that he managed to stage his own death in a "shootout" with thirteen sheriff's deputies and state troopers. Totally wacky.

[Hoosier-Daddy]

When looking for a giant bag of heated gas, one has to look no further than Richard C. Hoagland, Jupiter-sized blow-hard.

[Cobra Scott]

The Clinton Legacy....

The first US president to allow WMDs to be used against Extra Terrestrials....

[lepton]

This is funny. Just TRY keeping the pieces together.

[RightWhale]

The spacecraft carried several pounds of plutonium packaged in small pieces so there would be no danger of a critical mass in case the launch were aborted.