Amalthea

Amalthea, moon

Amalthea (/æməlˈθiːə/ am-əl-thee-ə; Greek : Αμάλθεια) is the third moon of Jupiter in order of distance from the planet. It was discovered on September 9, 1892, by Edward Emerson Barnard and named after Amalthea, a nymph in Greek mythology. It is also known as Jupiter V.

Amalthea is in a close orbit around Jupiter and is within the outer edge of the Amalthea Gossamer Ring, which is formed from dust ejected from its surface.From its surface, Jupiter would be an astonishing sight in its sky, appearing 46.5 degrees in diameter. Amalthea is the largest of the inner satellites of Jupiter. Irregularly shaped and reddish in color, it is thought to consist of porous water ice with unknown amounts of other materials. Its surface features include large craters and ridges.

Amalthea was photographed in 1979 by the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, and later, in more detail, by the Galileo orbiter in the 1990s. (OTT)

Characteristics
Amalthea is irregularly shaped, with the best ellipsoidal approximation being 250 × 146 × 128 km. From this, Amalthea's surface area is 161,000 square kilometers.. Like all other inner moons of Jupiter it is tidally locked with the planet, the long axis pointing towards Jupiter at all times. Its surface is heavily scarred by craters, some of which are extremely large relative to the size of the moon: Pan, the largest crater, measures 100 km across and is at least 8 km deep. Another crater, Gaea, measures 80 km across and is  twice as deep as Pan.Amalthea has several prominent bright spots, two of which are named. They are Lyctos Facula and Ida Facula, with width reaching up to 25 km. They are located on the edge of ridges.

Amalthea's irregular shape and large size led in the past to a conclusion that it is a fairly strong, rigid body, where it was argued that a body composed of ices or other weak materials would have been pulled into a more spherical shape by its own gravity. However, on November 5, 2002, the Galileo orbiter made a targeted flyby that came within 160 km of Amalthea and the deflection of its orbit was used to compute the moon's mass (its volume had been calculated previously—to within 10% or so—from a careful analysis of all extant images). In the end, Amalthea's density was found to be as low as 0.86 g/cm3,so it must be either a relatively icy body or very porous "rubble pile" or, more likely, something in between. Ancient measurements of infrared spectra from the Subaru telescope suggested that the moon indeed contains hydrous minerals (or organic materials), indicating that it cannot have formed in its current position, since the hot primordial Jupiter would have melted it. It is therefore likely to have formed farther from the planet or to be a captured Solar System body.

Amalthea radiates slightly more heat than it receives from the Sun, which is probably due to the influence of Jovian heat flux (<9 kelvin), sunlight reflected from the planet (<5 K), and charged particle bombardment (<2 K). This is a trait shared with Io, although for very different reasons.

History
Man first set foot on Amalthea during the Greater Solar System Survey Project in 2112 OTT. One of the project missions was the Jupiter Moon Survey of 2112 - 2114. Commander Linda Prokov set foot on Amalthea on July 2112. But her visit was only brief, she took a few samples and the crew of the survey ship mapped and made detailed measurements.

The large percentage of organic materials and the abunace of ice led was the reason the then still relative new company SII implemented the methods researched by  Carhill  on Thebe and established lichen and mushroom farms. (Also raising lettuce and carrots) Marketed a Ama-Carrs and Ama-Green, the produce became a staple of fresh food for Roid MIners and new colonies.(Operations begun around 2120 OTT)

Today SII maintains an Agro Bot engineering and several company internal schools. As well as a crop plant cloning facility (legal)