Completely Shameless plug of a video I just made

[Wyrmshadow]

At least I'm honest about it.

My latest creation is about 50 hours of work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRyQ1RWosQc

[GTX]

 

Am I correct in that the moons are made to look as though they are warm enough for water/vegetation etc?

Regards,

Greg

[frank2056]

I liked the video; the only things I found distracting were the faint gray grid and the blue "targeting" patterns. Although they weren't as distracting as the grids. The flybys were well done. It would have been nice to have the camera turn and show Jupiter in the FOV.

Greg, The Jovian moons (except Io, which is rocky) have thick layers of ice around rocky cores. Some of those layers are either soft ice or thick water oceans - Europa may have a thick ocean just a few km under the crust and Ganymede definitely has a thick salty water layer many 100s of kms. under the surface.

If these moons were warm enough to melt and have liquid water on their surface, it would be a very short lived affair - none of them are massive enough to retain an atmosphere at 273K - 300K and the water would quickly vaporize and be lost to space. So you would end up with an even smaller, airless and dry rocky core.

Titan (a moon of Saturn) is the only moon in the Solar System with a substantial atmosphere. This is only because it's even colder than Jupiter's moons and the average velocity of the gases in its atmosphere are far less than Titan's modest escape velocity.

Class dismissed!

[GTX]

I liked the video; the only things I found distracting were the faint gray grid and the blue "targeting" patterns. Although they weren't as distracting as the grids. The flybys were well done. It would have been nice to have the camera turn and show Jupiter in the FOV.

Greg, The Jovian moons (except Io, which is rocky) have thick layers of ice around rocky cores. Some of those layers are either soft ice or thick water oceans - Europa may have a thick ocean just a few km under the crust and Ganymede definitely has a thick salty water layer many 100s of kms. under the surface.

If these moons were warm enough to melt and have liquid water on their surface, it would be a very short lived affair - none of them are massive enough to retain an atmosphere at 273K - 300K and the water would quickly vaporize and be lost to space. So you would end up with an even smaller, airless and dry rocky core.

Titan (a moon of Saturn) is the only moon in the Solar System with a substantial atmosphere. This is only because it's even colder than Jupiter's moons and the average velocity of the gases in its atmosphere are far less than Titan's modest escape velocity.

Class dismissed!

Err, teacher, I kind of knew that already .  It still doesn't change my question though.

Regards,

Greg

[Wyrmshadow]

Am I correct in that the moons are made to look as though they are warm enough for water/vegetation etc?

Regards,

Greg

Odd, I never got email notices that anyone wrote anything.

Your assumption is correct, physics and reality has no place in this universe except in the realm of orbital mechanics.

Terraformed Solar System

@frank, I made the video as if a ship was flying from the outer edges of the Galilean moons and then in towards Jupiter, closer than the orbit of Io. All the moons are the correct size and distance from each other. They are even orbiting at the correct relative speed. It was a MASSIVE pain to try and keep the camera centered on them for any length of time without looking extremely jumpy. Also, the view tends to zoom past the moons very fast and relatively closely and the camera zoom and center suffers because of it. If you were looking for a nice scifi shot of all the moons in view at once, sorry.. that wasn't happening. You've been spoiled by pretty pictures made just for scifi movies.

[Cobra]

Awesome Job,Wyrmshadow This did give the Feeling of spacecraft Flyby! like you'd see in Star Trek the Next Generation! Keep up the Great Work Dan