Now here’s a excellent example of the importance of data frequency resolution! This New York Times article informs us about some ‘weird’ characteristics of the planet Uranus (apart from the juvenile fun you can have with the name).
But what’s even more fascinating, if you are a data geek, is the notion that Uranus ejects “plasmoids” (a blob of plasma and magnetic fields, responsible for a planet’s atmosphere leaking away) was formulated just recently after space scientists went back into thirty year old data taken during Voyager 2’s 1986 journey, increased the resolution of the data from 8-minute averages to ~2 seconds. They detected what’s known as an anomaly in the planet’s magnetic field. You have to click on the NASA blog post referenced in the article to find this graph, below. The red is the average line; the black is the higher time frequency.
The plasmoid release occupies only 60 seconds of Voyager’s 45-hour long flight by Uranus, but has led to all kinds of interesting informed speculation about Uranus’ characteristics, especially compared to the other planets in our solar system. This “60 seconds” reminds me of what I vaguely recall learning in an anthropology class in college about constructing an entire hominid from a single tooth. (I thought it was Australopithicus but I wasn’t able to quickly confirm that.). Obviously, scientists will have to further validate their findings, either with a follow-on trip to the outer planets, or other means.
But the story certainly is an interesting lesson in data science. And I bet the scientists were itching to say Uranus burps, or even better, farts.
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