Google Doodle Shows Juno Reaching Jupiter While Their Deepmind May Lead To Disease Detection


Google released a doodle of the space probe Juno shortly after it reached Jupiter. It showed NASA employees jumping for joy. Google has previously used the doodles to commemorate various occasions, and they can be found on the front page of the site.

USA Today reported that the doodle celebrates the NASA Juno spacecraft finally reaching the planet Jupiter. It took the spacecraft approximately five years to reach the planet. The doodle was updated by Google on Monday, and it featured the PacMan-like figures of NASA engineers.

Juno successfully entered the orbit of Jupiter after traveling 1.8 billion miles to reach the planet. Google put the doodle up shortly after the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California received confirmation that the spacecraft had safely entered the gravity of Jupiter. The graphic, affectionately known by Google users as the doodle, is frequently updated by the site to reflect important events.

Space reported that the retro image features the Jupiter spacecraft in the background with six figures in the front celebrating using the old school icons of party hats, clapping hands, and cameras. The space probe Juno launched in 2011 at a cost of $1.1 billion dollars. Its mission was to investigate the composition of Jupiter as well as its gravitational fields and interior composition. It will reveal a great deal of information to scientists on how the universe evolved.

It will take approximately 53 days for the spacecraft to travel around Jupiter. In October, Juno will perform another burn that will allow it to travel around the planet in only 14 days. The probe will also begin its main science mission using nine different scientific instruments to gather data on Jupiter, and its mission will last through February 2018. Once the mission is complete, Juno will intentionally launch itself into a death dive to the planet’s surface.

This isn’t the first time that Google has posted this type of doodle. They posted a doodle of the discovery of liquid water on Mars. There was also a doodle posted of the Horizon, another NASA spacecraft, that did a flyby of Pluto in 2015.

The BBC reported that Google’s Deepmind will take a peek at eye scans for deep eye analysis. They plan to use this artificial intelligence to analyze one million anonymous eyes scans from Moorfield Eye Hospital. Google’s technology was previously used to help doctors determine who was at risk for kidney disease, but the technology has been criticized because of an agreement to share patient data.

Sam Smith, a coordinator at the patient data campaign group, MedConfidential, said that it remains to be seen how the use of the technology will play out over time.

“But you do have organisations involved that aren’t principally concerned with DeepMind – they care about blindness in the case of RNIB and long term medical research in the case of the National Institute for Health Research.”

The Verge reported that using Google Deepmind technology would help to detect eye disease early. Google’s British-based artificial intelligence division is collaborating with the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) on the project.

Deepmind will be looking for two different eye conditions during the study; wet age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in the world right now. The collaboration between NHS and Google sparked an unsolicited request from a doctor at Moorfield. Consulting ophthalmologist Pearse Keane said that he believed the technology would do a good job of looking at the deeper portion of the eye. He contacted Google so that Moorfield could get involved.

[Photo via Google]

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