Callisto the Satellite of Jupiter Essay -- Astronomy

Its easy to see why not much attention is paid to Callisto. For four hundred years,Callisto appeared only as the fourth dot away when gazing at Jupiter through a telescope. It alsodidnt help Callisto gain attention by orbiting Jupiter. Jupiter may be wholeness of the most intriguingobjects that astronomers have yet to study. Jupiter is the king of the planets. With its complexbands and zones, Great Red Spot, and sheer size, Jupiter has captured our imaginations and haspushed us to learn and explore all we can approximately it. Now, with our Pioneer, Voyager, andespecially Galileo spacecrafts, we have uncovered mysteries of Callisto that give our minds andimaginations quite a workout.John D. Anderson used Radio Doppler data collected by the Deep Space net profit fromfive encounters of the Galileo spacecraft with Callisto. From this data him and his team foundthat Callisto has a mean radius of 2410.3 km, with no detectable deviation from sphericity. Theyassembled this data measurin g three dogma axes, and all three axes were equal to the meanradius with a realistic error of 1.5 km (Anderson et al., 2001). This places Callisto as the thirdlargest satellite in the Solar System, meagrely smaller than Mercury, but 1330 km in radius largerthan Pluto.Callisto does have an atmosphere. This is not comparable to the atmosphere of Titan orany other planet with a significant atmosphere. Nonetheless, an off-limb scan of Callisto wasconducted by the Galileo near-infrared mapping spectrometer in hopes to detect a carbon dioxideatmosphere. Airglow in the 4.26 m carbon dioxide band was and so observed up to 100 kmabove the surface. This indicates the presence of a tenuous carbon dioxide atmosphere withsurface pressure o... ...820 - 821.Dutch, Steven. Crater Forms. Natural and use Sciences. 10 05. 1999. University ofWisconsin. 07 12. 2005 .Kivelson, M. G. et al. (1999). Journal of Geophysical Research - Space Science, 104, A3, 4609-4625Moore J., and Malin M. (1988). Geophy s. Res. Lett., 5, 225.Schenk P. (1993). Journal ofGeophysics Research, 98, 7475.Spudis, Paul. The Geology of Multi-Ring Impact Basins. New York Cambridge UniversityPress, 1993.Thomas, C. and Ghail, R.C.. The Internal Structure of Callisto. Lunar and Planetary Science2002 1196-1197.Thorarinsson, S. (1957) The Jkulhlaup from the Katla bailiwick in 1955 compared with otherJkulhlaups in Iceland. Jkull 7, 21-25Wagner, R., Wolf, U, and Neukum, G.. Crater Size Distribution on Callisto. Lunar andPlanetary Science 2004 1964-1965.