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Weekend Roundup: Present at the Unraveling
"Present at the Creation" was the title Dean Acheson, the famed American secretary of state from 1949-1953, gave to his memoir, which recounts the vision and construction of the post-World War II institutions of global order such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the trade-opening precursor to the World Trade Organization, and NATO that followed on the heels of the United Nations. In that same era, French diplomat Robert Schuman, considered "the father of Europe," planted the seeds of European integration that have grown for the last several decades into a club of 28 countries with a population of 500 million. Both efforts, aimed at extinguishing the nationalism and protectionism seen as the root cause of world war, fostered the era of globalization now coming to an end. Brexit, like the Trump campaign in the U.S. and the rise of the anti-European Union right on the European continent, marks an historic turn of the tide. Today, we are present at the unraveling of those grand institutions that have outlived their capacity to deliver inclusively and lost the allegiance of their publics.

"Brexit is another demonstration," Craig Calhoun, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "that the big global institutions built in the wake of World War II are no longer able to maintain global order." Popular anger targeted distant and seemingly unaccountable cosmopolitan elites in charge of those institutions for failing to address pressing concerns over immigration and economic dislocation that are part and parcel of interdependence. "Brexit is a rejection of 'Cool Britannia,' the 1990s branding of a cosmopolitan, creative and united Britain as a part of a happy vision of globalization," Calhoun cuttingly quips.

The global order now waning has been the springboard for China's dramatic rise in recent decades. Writing from Beijing, He Yafei worries now that Brexit is only "the first wave of deglobalization" that will "rebalance in the domestic and EU-wide political landscape in favor of those anti-globalization and anti-EU forces." He might add the U.S. as well where Donald Trump this week lashed out at China and trade deals as the cause of America's woes.

The great historical question is what comes next -- a return to nationalism or a leap forward toward responsive new institutions with the capacity and competence to forge a deeper, more inclusive integration that can actually solve the problems at hand? Perpetual suspension in the purgatory between these historic options only fuels highly polarized discontent.

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer puts his finger squarely on the key contradiction behind chaos in Europe: for all the populist anger against "Brussels," the reality is that nation-states still run the show -- not least his own country whose insistence on protracted austerity policies in financially troubled southern Europe has destabilized politics there. "The EU institutions are blamed for all kinds of problems: globalization, immigration, welfare cuts and Thatcherism, youth unemployment, lack of democracy, and much more," he writes from Berlin. "In fact, by preventing the EU from addressing these issues, the national governments -- helpless to tackle them effectively on their own -- have made these problems worse." Also writing from Germany, Green activist Sven Giegold emphasizes Fischer's point. "Like the amputations practiced in medieval medicine," he says, "Brexit is not a cure. In the face of global challenges, European nation-states cannot secure self-determination and stability on their own. Cooperation with the European Union would make nation-states less vulnerable."

Writing from the dispassionate distance of New Delhi, Dhruva Jaishankar views Brexit as "the first major casualty of digital democracy." "Social media, rather than creating connections with people who possess differing points of view and ideologies," he observes, "tends to reinforce prejudice." Rather than being a force for consensus, the widespread use of social media during the Brexit debate spread misinformation and myths, feeding "polarization and gridlock." Writing from Paris, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, too, sees Brexit as a victory "not of democracy[,] but of demagogy."

This week's horrific suicide attack at Atatürk Airport in Istanbul is yet another indication of how post-World War II institutions have outlived their purpose in the face of new realities. NATO, the defense alliance rooted in the Cold War that ties together Turkey with European states that have also recently been subject to terrorism, is a complete mismatch with the security challenges confronting these countries today. Writing from Istanbul, Behlül Özkan sees the main target of the so-called Islamic State as Turkey's secular democracy because it is the opposite of its idea of a caliphate. Turkish novelist Kaya Genc relates the enveloping mood after the series of recent attacks. "Istanbul as a bridge of cultures belonged to the noughties: the 2010s is the decade of ruptures."

WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports personal stories from on the ground in Istanbul about how local residents are reaching out to help the victims and follows the investigation by authorities into Islamic State suspects from post-Soviet states. Dean Obeidallah is upset that the American media does not give the same attention to terror attacks in Muslim-majority places like Istanbul as it does to similar attacks in Paris or Brussels.

"india

Digging for water in India's devastating drought. © Vivek Singh

While headlines from London and Istanbul grip the global attention, a drought in India affecting a staggering 330 million barely registers. Reporting exclusively for The WorldPost from Bundelkhand, a vast rural landscape in north-central India, photojournalist Vivek Singh chronicles the life and death struggle for drops of water in striking black and white images that convey the desperation leading to farmer suicide and mass migration in the country. "As the crisis deepens," Singh says, "the country that celebrated the 1960s agricultural revolution and a resulting boom in production of food grains is now seeing its farmers dying in debt and despair."

In our continuing series on Africa and China presented by Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden, a Nigerian living in Guangzhou asks, "why are Chinese people so racist towards black people?" The two also look at how Chinese ivory smugglers in Namibia are affecting that southern African nation's efforts to curb the illegal trade.

In a thoughtful riposte to a recent interview with "Sapiens" author Yuval Harari in The WorldPost, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains why we creative humans can't accept an algorithmic account of human life based only in intellectual processes. "The history of human cultures," he writes, "is in good part a narrative of our resistance to native algorithms by means of inventions not predicted by those algorithms." No algorithm could have designed the cultivated beauty of these Japanese gardens and landscapes captured by the sensitive aesthetic of photographer Hidenobu Suzuki. Finally, our Singularity series this week profiles a robot that can wash your dishes.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.

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Give Zoos A Break And Pay Tribute To Harambe The Gorilla On The One Month Anniversary Of His Death
In my opinion, in regard to the death of Harambe a month after his untimely death, the Cincinnati Zoo made the best decision possible under horrible circumstances.

In the wake of the unfortunate and terribly tragic event at the Zoo, I was invited to participate in a radio interview with The Takeaway, a radio program affiliated with WNYC and Public Radio International.

Jack D'Isidoro, an award-winning freelance multimedia journalist and producer who contributes regularly to the New York Times, reached out to me on May 31st. Unfortunately, I was unable to share my thoughts with his intended audience. I was busy training dogs at my new boarding and enrichment facility in Los Angeles and had missed his email and phone call.

Yesterday, almost a month after Harambe's death, I discovered that I also missed an email alert regarding a post I published in Nat Geo's online editorial news publication on the future of zoos. The piece was cited in a Washington Post article concerning Harambe's fate, which reminded me that nearly a month has passed since we lost this great ape.

Although I did post an article about the tragedy on my public Facebook page hours after it was reported, I never got a chance to share my sentiment publicly. When I heard the news, I was immediately struck by the thought of a zoo having to make such a terrible sacrifice and was grieving for Harambe who I have never even met or knew of. I wanted to let colleagues and FB followers, zoo professionals and activists alike, know of this unfortunate news.

The Washington Post article (http://gmailnews.com/what-harambes-death-means-for-a-critically-endangered-species-of-gorilla-washington-post/) included commentary from a notable zoo historian who I once participated in a radio interview with and Dr. Michael Hutchins, my esteemed colleague and friend, and a prominent zoo and wildlife biologist.

These zoo experts addressed the big picture---the conservation relevance of losing a valuable zoo gorilla. They discussed the impact of the loss of this one animal's potential contribution to the reserve gene pool, which is essentially what a captive population of this critically endangered species represents.

Frankly, the fact that the gorilla is an endangered species still hasn't crossed my mind in regard to this loss of life. This was a beautiful and sentient creature who died at his prime, whether he was in a zoo or free-ranging or contributing to the captive gene pool or not.

I will never have a chance to read and process all the rumor and rhetoric surrounding Harambe that has been generated by the public and the responses from professional experts. However, I keep thinking about him and what a loss this must be for the zoo keepers and staff who cared for him. The staff had to make a horrible life and death decision on his behalf in less than a second. You can't wait for a tranquilizer to take effect when you have to respond in a moment's notice.

To put it in perspective, I once darted an orphaned, 300lb. subadult grizzly bear that I raised from a 9-month-old cub with a syringe pole (similar to a jab stick) while I was standing a few feet away from her at a wildlife sanctuary in Alaska. There was no barrier between us. As she looked the other way, I quickly injected her. I had time on my hands to prepare, no public distraction or interference, and my colleagues from Alaska Department of Fish & Game were on hand to monitor and assist if needed. An unusual and unique circumstance dictated that the animal be tranquilized on exhibit.

However, in a zoo setting far more resources and preparation would go in to such a scheduled chemical immobilization planned for a potentially injurious large animal and any chemical restraint would be conducted behind-the-scenes or before or after visiting hours. Nonetheless, I remember that it felt like a long time had passed before this bear was adequately sedated. In reality, it was at least several minutes.

In Harambe's case, this was an unscheduled and obvious emergency and darting the animal was really not a viable option. Waiting for a tranquilizer to take effect would add substantially more time to an already precarious situation for the boy even if Harambe was indeed protecting him. When an animal receives a remote dart injection, it is typically a surprise to them and they usually don't like it at all. They react as you might react if you were darted with a flying syringe from a great distance. What if he was holding the child and then collapsed on top of him due to the effects of a potent sedative? Anything could have happened. Regardless, I was touched by the public outcry and very much understand the emotions elicited and the public response.

Again, the Zoo made a very difficult choice, but I believe it was the right one. I very much like the Cincinnati Zoo, but I am in no way obligated to defend their actions. I do sit on a board of a zoo advocacy organization, but I'm not financially compensated by the non-profit organization. I just believe in the mission of zoos and I love charismatic creatures that receive exemplary human care in these conservation centers. I have been very fortunate to have interacted with many wonderful zoo animals over the years and the experiences have been tremendously gratifying and rewarding for me. I can only hope I enriched the lives of these animals in return.

I was moved after watching some of the footage as Harambe seemed to embrace the boy as he reached out to hold him. I can only speculate that he was not acting aggressively toward the child and had no such intention to do so. The scene is imprinted in my brain and it is unforgettable. I have a lot of thoughts on the tragedy as a former zookeeper and curator and as a conservationist. But first and foremost, I'm an animal lover like so many of my friends and zoo colleagues and the readership communities who follow Huffington Post. So this decision was hard to process even for someone like me who appreciates the challenges this precarious human-captive animal interaction created for the Zoo.

There are clearly mixed reviews on how the Cincinnati Zoo handled the situation even among some of my colleagues. Some just hope the story dies down. But I'm haunted by what transpired and I felt compelled to offer my perspective as a zoo patron and former zoo employee.

I think zoos do their very best to contain zoo animals and in recent years they have spent extra resources on making sure people can't breach perimeter barriers and get into zoo enclosures, but it is the public's responsibility to keep our children safe and that responsibility falls largely on parents.

In fact, I think that some exhibits should have age limitation restrictions for access. Children who are too young often can't even appreciate the magic of an intimate encounter with a majestic animal icon in a zoo setting like a silverback gorilla. More often than not they seem to incite animals unintentionally by pounding on glass or by running around screaming and crying.

Those are not ways of respecting or dignifying a zoo animal ambassador and their parents should know better. Hopefully teachers and other attendants will also learn from this.

Rather than enriching the experience for the animal, I'm pretty confident some of the behavior of young children leaves sentient zoo animals frustrated, if not demoralized. Anyone can see it is occasionally stimulating for the animals and from a gorilla's perspective, for example, it can be perceived as play when they get to interact with rambunctious kids through glass barriers. However, we should expect some etiquette from zoo visitors. They are guests at a public venue and these animal ambassadors deserve some respect from patrons.

In my opinion, the zoo was left with no choice but to dispatch a beautiful, healthy and robust adult male gorilla. And again, what a terrible predicament for the animal care team to find themselves in.

I recall an incident where a male gorilla broke his neck from a shallow fall in a freak accident in an indoor enclosure at another Ohio zoo. This was twenty years ago. I was in the building doing relief work as a zoo keeper in another animal unit. Unfortunately, no primate care staff member witnessed the incident and there were few helpful reports from patrons. Like the event with Harambe, the other gorilla death was quite unprecedented and has not happened before or since to my knowledge.

In the case of the fallen gorilla, one of our veterinary clinicians responded immediately and tried to resuscitate the animal after the public was ushered out of the building. His three other adult male companions were quickly lured off exhibit into their bedrooms with issued recall commands by a trained and responsive keeper staff. Relocating the other apes was necessary so the vet could access the unconscious animal. The veterinarian, who is board certified in zoo and wildlife medicine, was on the scene just minutes after the emergency was announced through our radio communication system, but sadly he was not able to revive the gorilla after several attempts to administer CPR.

In Harambe's case (based on what I saw in video footage), there was no time to recall him or perhaps other apes in close proximity because the child was already in the exhibit, having breached barriers.

Although Harambe may indeed have been protecting this little boy, the surface features of that gorilla enclosure are to some degree slightly unforgiving to even a much sturdier and more agile young gorilla of comparable age and size to the child. The boy is really lucky to have left the situation relatively unscathed. These enclosures are definitely designed for great apes and not little boys.

The child could have easily broken his neck or otherwise been seriously or fatally injured in all the commotion and all by mere accident. These are big, fast moving primates. Hence, the name "great ape" is an appropriate label for these, the largest of the non-human primates.

By just working around wild animals in captivity, including three species of great apes, provides me with enough insight into the potential hazards in a zoo enclosure. Even the exhibit void of animals can be dangerous for humans to navigate. Keepers are careful when they clean enclosures. It is easy to slip or fall or trip on enrichment items or artificial rock work.

Oddly enough, the barriers in high-rise shopping centers and other public attractions from Niagara Falls to walkway and automobile bypass structures around the country remain in conditions where barriers can be easily breached by unsupervised children. And we hear about tragedies when young children fall to their death or are left severely injured. Who can forget the devastating loss Eric Clapton faced when his young son fell to his death from a high-rise apartment building? And his son was at home with his mom and a maid.

I may be an exceptionally over-educated "retired" zookeeper and curator, but those are the thoughts that I would have shared had I not been training animals during the scheduled radio interview that I was invited to participate in. Rest in peace Harambe. You are missed.

We invite you to join Dr. Schaul's verified public facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/jordan.schaul

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What Economists Don't Know About Physics -- And Why It's Killing Us
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. -- Kenneth Boulding

(Spaceship Earth: NASA)

The mantra of classical economists is "growth." So fixated are they on growth that recessions are often referred to as periods of "negative growth."

The dominant economic paradigm: If we can keep growing the pie, everyone's piece will get larger. Never mind that, as the pie grows, the greedy cut monstrous pieces for themselves and slivers for the rest of us. The foundational assumption itself is flawed. The empty promise of perpetual growth is based on folly -- and on a fluke of evolutionary history that has allowed humankind to temporarily disregard the laws of physics.

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For most of the time humans have inhabited the earth, our numbers were small, and the growth rate of our species was nearly zero. In other words, we were more-or-less in equilibrium with the natural world, as were most species.

The doubling time of the human population just prior to the Industrial Revolution was about 500 years. Following the Industrial Revolution, England's growth rate shot to 1.6 percent, its population doubling every 43 years. What the hell happened?

In two words: fossil fuels. Fossil fuels propelled the Industrial Revolution, which in turn gave us mechanization, rapid transportation, the subjugation of nature, and industrial agriculture, all the ingredients for modern, urbanized, high-density societies. Powered first by coal, then oil, and now gas, the world's human population more than tripled between 1950 and 2010.

Fossil fuels have been a Faustian bargain. Civilization as we know it has been purchased by mortgaging the future. To understand why we need some physics.

Thermodynamicists refer to isolated, closed, and open systems. An isolated system is hermetically sealed: it can exchange neither matter nor energy with its surroundings. At the other extreme, an open system can exchange both. With a semi-permeable boundary, a closed system, can exchange energy but not matter.

Save for a stray meteorite that might increase our planet's mass by a tiny fraction, the earth's mass is static. However, it's surface is subject daily to an enormous flux of solar radiation (sunlight), most of which is re-radiated back to space. So, for all practical purposes, spaceship earth is a closed system.

Mainstream economists tend to think of the economy as an abstract, mathematical automaton independent of the physical world. But economic activity necessarily requires natural resources, which are in finite supply simply because spaceship earth is closed. Fallacy number one: The notion of perpetual economic growth is absurd on face value because it demands an unbounded supply of natural resources and thus an infinitely large earth.

Fallacy number two is more subtle and involves the thermodynamic idea of entropy. Entropy is a slippery concept requiring care. Most commonly, entropy is a quantitative measure of disorder within a thermodynamic system. For example, uncork a perfume bottle in a sealed room, and then watch and wait. After several hours the densely concentrated perfume molecules will have diffused and dispersed all throughout the room. They will not then spontaneously reassemble themselves back inside the perfume bottle. The simple vignette illustrates nature's most fundamental law -- the Second Law of Thermodynamics -- which states that entropy tends to increase over time in an isolated system.

On spaceship earth, the Second Law implies that the order and structure of the economy are purchased at the price of disorder and degradation of the ecosphere. Fortunately, the earth being a closed system (admitting energy), ecological degradation can be reversed, but only on a time scale that is long relative to a human lifespan.

With regard to energy, it is useful to think of entropy as quantifying the concentration (or availability) of the form of energy. Highly concentrated energy -- coal, for example -- has low entropy. Low-grade, diffuse energy -- say, waste heat -- has high entropy. Although energy is conserved, according to the Second Law, entropy tends to increase over time. For example, consider burning coal to produce electricity to power lights, stoves, and refrigerators. All the electrical energy used to power those devices eventually winds up as waste heat. Waste energy is not lost, but at high entropy, it is essentially unusable.

Think then of fossil fuels as concentrated sunlight, the products of millions of years of photosynthesis during the Carboniferous Period. Such dense, low-entropy energy is a fluke of the earth's evolutionary history. Fossil energy has allowed humans to proliferate and civilizations to sprout at an abnormally fast pace, and for the degradation of the earth's biosphere at a rate far beyond her natural ability to regenerate.

Our dependence on fossil energy therefore has us in a double bind. First, fossil fuels are in finite supply. If they run out before sufficient low-entropy replacements are found, civilizations will crash due to energy unavailability. But if we don't soon quit using them, atmospheric CO2 from burning fossils will crash the ecosphere. We're between a rock and a hard place.

The current economic paradigm of perpetual growth greatly exacerbates our dilemma. Having originated during the age of fossil fuels -- when abnormal growth was the rule -- classical economics ignores the fundamental role played by entropy in sustainability and suggests that we can simply continue business as usual into the future. Classical economic theory has thus placed on a trajectory toward catastrophe.

Fortunately, not all economists are blind to physical laws. As early as 1857, John Stuart Mill developed a non-growth "stationary-state" economic model. More recently, the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993) proposed a theory of "evolutionary economics," which considers human economy as a subsystem of evolutionary biology. And in 1977, Herman Daly sounded the clarion call for "ecological economics" with the publication of Steady-State Economics. Daly, a 2014 recipient of the Blue Planet Prize, is currently on staff at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady-State Economy (CASSE).

"Economics for a Full World" -- Daly's 2014 address in Tokyo -- is lucid and accessible. It deserves to be read in entirety for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that he offers concrete and reasonable solutions for both our economic and ecological woes. Here are a few gems from Daly:

Because of exponential growth since World War II, we now live in a full world, but we still behave as if it were empty.

That richer (more net wealth) is better than poorer is a truism. The relevant question, though, is, does growth still make us richer, or has it begun to make us poorer by increasing "illth" faster than wealth?

Examples of "illth" are everywhere, even if they are still unmeasured in national accounts. They include things like nuclear wastes, climate change from excess carbon in the atmosphere, biodiversity loss, depleted mines, deforestation, eroded topsoil, dry wells and rivers, sea level rise, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, gyres of plastic trash in the oceans, and the ozone hole.

Their refusal to acknowledge [ecological limits] is why many economists cannot conceive of the possibility that growth in GDP could ever be uneconomic.

The economy should not be used as an idiot machine dedicated to maximizing waste.

Our vision and policies should be based on the integrated view of the economy as a subsystem of the finite and non-growing ecosphere.

And, quoting John Ruskin, "There is no wealth but life."

Hope remains, but only if humans transition quickly from an unsustainable economic paradigm to one in which "humans and markets are not exempt from the laws of nature."

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Juno Is Arriving At Jupiter On July 4
The national fireworks on July 4 this year will be joined by celestial fireworks as NASA's Juno mission arrives at Jupiter after five years of travel from Earth. Principals of the mission and its scientific experiments discussed the plans for the orbital insertion at a press conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, today, as Juno reached Jupiter's doorstep. Juno, in Roman mythology, was the wife of the king of the gods, Jupiter.

Juno's path is to thread a needle between Jupiter's radiation belts and its atmosphere. Starting at 11:18 pm EDT (8:18 pm PDT) on July 4's evening, the spacecraft will burn its main engine to slow it from its 165,000 mph speed with respect to Earth, one of the highest speeds ever reached. The burn should last 35 minutes, until 11:53 pm EDT (8:53 pm PDT). Eager scientists and engineers, joined by journalists and those watching on NASA TV around the world, will listen for a beep at the beginning of the engine burn and another beep at the end of the burn, hoping that the exact timing indicates a successful insertion into a polar orbit around Jupiter. All action actually took place 48 minutes earlier, since the radio signals from Jupiter currently take 48 minutes to travel to Earth at the speed of light. The last commands to Juno are being sent today; the spacecraft will then be on its own for a few days, though, of course, it will be monitored.

It will then take a couple of days before the instruments are turned on. The spacecraft has been made to spin faster than previously, 5 rpm, to improve its stabilization before the burn; it will be slowed to 2 rpm for its science observations. Not since the Pioneer spacecraft has rotation been used for stabilization, but this spacecraft is in one of NASA's smaller (and less expensive) spacecraft series, following on the very successful New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto last year.

Most of the instruments deal with Jupiter's particles and magnetic field, which is 20,000 times more powerful than Earth's. The main instruments, to protect them, are in a vault made of 400 pounds of titanium to protect them from high radiation. The Junocam, its imaging camera, is outside that protection, and may not last as long as other instruments; further, it will give images as it rotates that will have to be transformed to the equivalent of steady views.

Juno's instruments will be powered by huge solar panels; end to end, the spacecraft would fill a basketball court from hoop to hoop. A boom at the end of one arm extends even further, to put the magnetic-field measuring equipment as far from the metal at the spacecraft's center as possible, to minimize distortions.

When the planets of our solar system formed about 5 billion years ago, Jupiter took up about half the leftover material besides the Sun. Juno's main goals include discovering what the inside of Jupiter is like, as part of understanding how the planets formed. One specific goal is to discover whether Jupiter has a rocky or ice core of elements heavier than helium. It has been estimated as being 10 to 20 times the Earth's mass; though dense, it is not necessarily solid, even under the huge pressure near Jupiter's center.

Juno will be in an extended elliptical orbit, coming as close as only 5000 miles above the cloudtops at its lowest point. Its 14-day elliptical orbit will be timed so that each time it comes close it passes a few degrees in longitude around the planet, so that by the time it completes three dozen orbits after about a year, it will have mapped the planet at high accuracy completely. But unlike previous spacecraft to Jupiter, it is concentrating on a layer under the visible cloud deck, where the magnetic field is apparently formed. That layer stays much steadier than does Jupiter's atmosphere above it.

Jupiter's magnetosphere is huge; if we could see it, it would appear as big as our Moon appears in our sky. We know from measuring radio signals from Jupiter that the magnetic field rotates like clockwork, even though the cloud deck rotates at different speeds at different latitudes. The magnetic field generates a huge, fairly steady aurora, over twice as large as Earth. The spacecraft has been traveling within Jupiter's magnetosphere, where the magnetic field dominates, for about a week.

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sunset flight by Jan Sterren

It's not always easy to find the days where such flights in the evening are possible, because we have usually a lot of wind. But then when it's on, it's such a pleasure. Just sitting there in your harness, enjoying the moment with a friend.

Road To Nowhere. by Inge Bovens

Press H to view on black, it makes a huge difference! Facebook || Instagram

very fune by KR Kirushna

Hacia la luz by juandevillalba

Hacia la luz

That Mountain by Petra M. Schmitz

Skin and Dust by Isabella Bubola

Self portrait, 2015. Website / Facebook / Instagram / Blog