Month: September 2022

Enlarge / The complex, ice-covered surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft during a flyby on Sept. 29, 2022. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SWRI/MSSS)

3:25pm ET Update: A few hours after Juno's flyby, the spacecraft started sending data back to Earth. NASA has published the first of these processed photos, which shows a region near the moon’s equator called Annwn Regio. The data in this photo was collected at a distance of 352 km above the moon, the point of closest approach during this flyby.

Plenty of rugged terrain is visible in this image, including dark ridges and troughs across the surface. The oblong pit near the terminator might be a degraded impact crater, NASA says.

Original post: On Thursday morning, NASA's Juno spacecraft swooped down to within 358 km of the surface of Europa, the large, ice-encrusted Moon that orbits Jupiter.

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Lights went out as Hurricane Fiona devastated areas from the Caribbean to Canada, and Hurricane Ian has done the same. Hurricanes, along with other natural disasters like wildfires and winter storms, can leave people without access to electricity.

However, new research out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that added solar capacity, paired with batteries, can help address this problem. The study makes use of historic long-term power outages (caused by disasters) and models the performance of behind-the-meter solar and energy storage systems functioning as a kind of backup source of power during long-term power interruptions.

Behind-the-meter refers to solar systems that are installed on a customer’s residence—on the customer side of the electricity meter. The more common term for this is “roof-top solar,” according to Galen Barbose, research scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the paper’s authors. “It’s more customer-sided solar,” he told Ars.