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Rain On Saturn's Titan
BradeRunna writes: "Space.com has a very interesting article describing earth-like weather (even rain) on Saturn's moon, Titan. Especially of note as the surface temperatures hover around minus 288 degrees Fahrenheit. Guess we'll have to wait until the Cassini spacecraft makes it out there in Summer 2004 to get the full skinny ..." A sidebar to the article is a cute comparison between Earth's weather and Titan's.
It's raining methane, halleluja.
It's raining methane, halleluja.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Throw in some livestock and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Where do you think all the methane came from in the first place?
No, some corporate hack sells it for $2.50 a bottle...
Intolerant people should be shot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If the pressure in the suit is lower than the outside pressure, the main problem would be the methane leaking in. Not that I know whether this is the case, but let's speculate.
Since methane stinks, you'd probably notice the leak pretty quickly, and be able to hold your breath until the leak was fixed. Since methane isn't poisonous for us, we might only keep the helmet oxygenated and fill the rest of the suit with warmed up methane. The smaller the area you need to protect against leaks, the easier, and the helmet has the excellent property of not having any moving parts.
there's plenty of oxygen for that in your suit. In a methane atmosphere, you'd be more concerned about igniting the oxygen... just leak a little and you can have it happen.
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Maybye I'm missing something, but it seems to me that evaporation and condensation have to be at equilibruim in order to produce a long-lasting weather cycle.
It doesn't seem logical to list either one as a primary cause of a weather cycle as they are two sides of the same coin.
Well...You wouldn't have to worry about the methane igniting until you are going inside.
There has to be free oxygen and a lot hotter for it to ignite.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
methane doesn't stink!
It's all suphurous impurities that makes farts pong. The smell of propane (regular "gas" gas) comes from additives designed to make it easily detectable.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
We had a mercaptan spill in the chemistry lab when I was studying. It was not fun. First we though we would all be blown to hell, then (when we realised what was going on) it was just nausiating. The smell changes from "gas" to dead rat to garlic as the concentration goes up. Worse, if you breathe it long enough it oozes out your pores for the rest of the day and YOU stink like a dead rat!
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Correct, methane doesn't stink.
Just curious, where did you pick up your vocabulary? I have to say that your usage of the word "pong" cracked me up; as is laughing with you, as opposed to laughing *at* you.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
It was an ethanol atmosphere....
A kelvin is similar to celsius, where 0 celsius is = to 273 Kelvins. Absolute 0, the lowest theoretical temperature, where all atoms stop moving is defined as 0 Kelvin
Round the firewall,
Out the NIC,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
NOTHING BUT NET!
I was very dissapointed by that comparison, and it's level of cuteness. Perhaps you should supply me with a comparison of Britney Spears and Christina Aguillara so I can achieve my cute comparison quota for the day.
--It's Pimptastic!--
Now, now I live in New England, let's try to be nice =) Actually our summer this year was like Titan's: Wet and cold. I wonder if I can call the mayor of Seattle and ask him if he wants his weather back? =)
Damn sheep....
There's enough bandwidth if the receiver and transmitter frequencies are the same; the problem is that as the received signal is Doppler-shifted by the probe's high relative velocity, its spectrum moves out of the receiver's passband.
It's definitely an "oops", but it's not something that would show up in ground-based testing unless you specifically tested for that effect. It's easier to forgive them for this one than it was for that metric/imperial screwup on the mars probe.
Simple. 1/2 the diameter means 1/8 the volume. So there you go.
Main Entry: rain
a: Water or liquid Methane falling in drops condensed from from vapour or Methane in the atmosphere b: the descent of this water or liquid Methane c: wateror liquid Methane that has fallen as rain
I was just watching the TITANIC and now I'm wondering what icebergs on Titan are made of.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
Good call.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
It's easier to forgive them for this one than it was for that metric/imperial screwup on the mars probe.
:-(
No, it isn't. Doppler calculations are one of the most fundamental EE tools used in terrestrial satellite system work. Even ham radio operators have to take it into account. This is a truly amazing engineering f***up -- it had to be made at the most fundamental level, where any newly-graduated BSEE should have been able to catch it. It's incredible that it made it into a multi-billion-dollar planetary probe.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
With an efficient rebreather, you wouldn't have to carry that much oxygen (assuming a normal spacewalk lenght stay), and you could keep it at relatively low pressure. If your space suit is leaking enough O2 into the atmosphere to start a fire, your bigger problem is that you were counting on that O2 to keep breathing.
-B
Imagine...... a Beowulf Cluster of, what else, Slashdot! Seriously, I know this is off-topic, but I have uncovered another slashdot mirror! Yes, it's true, you can find it here Slashdot Mirror .
You can't smell methane. The smell of natural gas is added, not naturally present. Some people think that methane is what makes farts smell too, but it's actually the Sulphur Dioxide. Methane itself is about as easily detected by humans as CO2 is. We die when our lungs get flooded with it silently.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Hey, if Arthur C Clark can change planets between books, I don't see why I can't change planets during a post. Anyway, "Jupiter orbit objectly warming" sounds better to me anyway...
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
you heard me
"Space.com has a very interesting article describing earth-like weather (even rain) on Saturn's moon, Titan. Especially of note as the surface temperatures hover around minus 288 degrees Fahrenheit. Guess we'll have to wait until the Cassini spacecraft makes it out there in Summer 2004 to get the full skinny ..."
Jeezus christ! Would the rain freeze into hail by the time it hits the surface?
Actually, since it's a methane environment, your suit doesn't have to leak much to start a fire -- the flame could be right at the point of the leak.
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Don't forget your umbrella.
Rain AND -288F? Oooo sign me up! When's our first mission??
Aw hell, I can get rain and 0F by moving back to New England =)
Methane rain (That must smell nice)
If i am not mistaken i believe that methane is actually pretty much odorless, when we use it for gas to homes and the like we add chemicals so that we can smell it, and not die (in AU at least)
btw, does anyone know of a site that will point out the best hardware for a dual Linux / Windows box, for gaming and work purposes?
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Methane rain (That must smell nice), pools of liquid methane with other hydrocarbons on the surface. Sounds like Titan is natures on refueling station.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Constant rain... hydrocarbons and methane in the air, making it patently unbreathable... -288 degree temperature.
Hell, that sounds like the average winter in South Dakota! Throw in some livestock and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Maybe when we send our first probes their we'll find Mount Zorbarmore and Wa'al Drug left behind by the aliens...
In C.
Just for those readers born in the 20th century.
The whole thing reminds me of the Mark Twain quote:
" The worst winter I ever lived through was the summer I spent in San Francisco."
I guess Sam never summered over on Titan.
(-288-32)*5/9 = -178 C
Of course, I suspect that both these numbers have spurious accuracy.
Now where have I seen this before...? Oh yeah, thats right, on Slashdot. :o] at least check the category youre posting under to see if that story has been run within the past WEEK!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Plain methane is completely odorless. In commercial uses, tiny quantities of methylmercaptan are added to give it a distinctive, unpleasant odor. I've always wanted to obtain a very small quantity of pure methylmercaptan and release it in, oh let's say some random high school, and watch them evacuate the place for fear of a non-existant gas leak. But that's probably tremendously illegal. Damn laws won't let anybody have fun.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
To ease the constraints of laundry facilities on a manned mission, just hang the clothes outside the station (perhaps using the antenna array of the Huygens) and wait for the amonia and methane rain to get those whites their brightest...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Lower gravity and denser atmosphere means that you could not only survive on Titan with a much simpler space suite than you need for work on the moon but you can also fly with simple wings sprouting from your arms.
No. I am serious about both points. Since the atmosphere is denser than earth but less dens than say water, you don't need a pressure suite just something completely sealed that wont tear easily and keeps the Methane off your skin. More importantly it only has to deal with cold temperatures not the -200 to +200 degree fluctuations in earth orbit.
About the wings. The reason we were never able to fly with arm mounted wings is that #1 we are generally not strong enough to build manipulate wings that can support a human and #2 those wings have to be so very large.
However on Titan they need only be 1/7th the size of your tipical glider's wingspan. Posibly less if you consider the denser atmosfare. So just as we can fly throgh water by flaping our bare arms we should be able to fly on titan with tiny wings just barley longer than our arms and as little as 2 feet thick. I.e. The sort of thing that can be built into a plastic suite that's all soft on the outside to prevent sparks from igniting that methane.
Better yet wings of that size could be made retractable and the smaller suite means you could store a larger air supply. A rebrether ( filters out your own CO2 ) would do wonders too.
R. Kelly would be proud.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Titan smells like a big ol' fart! o.O
Fart clouds, fart rain, fart seas.... disgusting!
You mean - "Saturn orbital objectily warm it" right? I mean, it's not like the rings on the planet on the heading illustration give it away, or nothing.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Actually this has been proposed, at least by SF writers, and more for Jupiter's moons (or for Mars) than for Titan, but the idea is the same.
A body without (much) internal heat anywhere in the Solar System is heated by solar radiation, which is mainly visible light. In equilibrium it re-radiates that energy mainly as infrared (the colder it is, the longer the wavelength). If you can surround it with something that is transparent to visible light, but opaque, or reflective, to infrared, then it can;t radiate the heat away and gets hotter. CO2 has such properties to a modest extent. Various rather exotic gasses much more so. It has been computed that adding 1 part per million of some of these gasses to Mars's atmosphere would warm the equator of Mars to the temperatures of the arctic on Earth.
Titan would be a much bigger problem, and it might be more efficient to use some more direct heating method, but the greenhouse effect has its part to play.
Celcius and Farenheit both suck. Everyone should use Kelvins, considering the lowerest possible temperature that can ever be is defined as 0 Kelvin, and converting into celsius is simple. As for farenheit ... its useless.
Round the firewall,
Out the NIC,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
NOTHING BUT NET!
Rain on Titan. That is something to experience before you die.
Along the same lines, Titan by Stephen Baxter is about a manned mission by NASA to titan. About a third of the book actaully takes place on Titan with the astronauts having to try and amintain a level of self sufficiency. Altogether a good book.
Especially of note as the surface temp temperatures hover around minus 288 degrees Fahrenheit.
I guess that means the weather-girl on the Daily Titanic News broadcast really would be a frozen bitch.
(Aw ... geez, I'm really politically incorrect today. Even Pooh Bear is hiding from the fallout ...).
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Boys, boys...
Let's start talking about rain again. OK?
Dynoman7
Blarf.
We can make it livable. If we belive what Gore says about global warming, all we would have to do to warm it up is put some cars and factories on the planet and we can globally warm it!
So, who got it right (where it actually mattered to the story)?
--
TC - My Photos..
Trouble indeed, trouble on triton. Hehe, well, at least the book was good.
I havn't been around /. a lot recently, but I don't remember hearing anything about this hardware problem that they recently discovered.
Apparently some nincompoop on the Cassini design team decided that it would be smart to not design the reciever on the orbiting probe to have enough bandwidth to take in all of the data that the probes in the atmosphere/on the surface could send up. Not smart.
Rami
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rJames.org - illustration
I'm booking the next flight to Titan! =P
-DAcash18
With the news of severe weather, the Weather Channel is probably already making arrangements to fly Jim Cantore out there. Expect live reports sometime next week. .^
^.