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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.
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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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."
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
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
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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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!
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 ?
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.
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!
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!
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