Re: Amazing facts from NASA

In article <1Pb4h.8072$xw1.5252@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Frank Glover <greenie31@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
The *big* supplies of He-3 in the solar system are in the atmospheres
of the gas-giant planets. But mining it from there is a challenge.

Do we have any sense of the percentages of He-3 there?

We have solid data only for Jupiter: its upper atmosphere has about
23ppm of He-3 (vs. about 14% He-4), as determined by the Galileo probe's
mass spectrometer.

As best I can discover with a quick look at some references, we have no
actual data on He-3 in the other gas-giant atmospheres. We know their
helium content to within a percent or two -- it varies somewhat from
planet to planet -- from Voyager data mostly, but there's no way to pick
out a small amount of He-3 by remote sensing. It's a reasonable guess
that their helium would be 0.01-0.02% He-3, like Jupiter's; this roughly
matches estimates of the He-3 content of helium in the pre-solar nebula.
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