[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.

[ElkGroveDan]

No it was real. I read about it when it happened:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/jupiter_dark_spot_031023.html

[beezdotcom]

Hmmm. It seems that mysterious dark spots pop up on Jupiter all the time. Here are two others.
2002
1998

Hoagland is REALLY strectching to make the connection - but why would that surprise me.

[Prime Choice]

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.

But the whole concept behind a thermonuclear reaction is generating enough heat to produce the nuclear fusion. Fission is not required to do this, but it is a convenient shortcut.

All that is required to initiate a thermonuclear reaction is something that can produce enough heat to excite the tritium or deuterium atoms to collide with enough force to fuse (hence the term "thermo" in "thermonuclear"). We've been experimenting with lasers to accomplish this.

Moreover, the fissionable material on Galileo is wildly insufficient to beget the alleged fission reaction. Galileo didn't even remotely possess enough material to qualify as critical mass. And that would be required for an appreciable fission reaction capable of generating enough heat to start a thermonuclear reaction. Somehow I doubt that Galileo was fitted with beryllium/polonium injectors to compensate for that plutonium deficit.