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Continents on Titan?
Saint Aardvark writes: "CNN reports here that a second bright spot has been found on Titan. The speculation is that it's a continent, but scientists can't be sure until Cassini arrives at Saturn and drops the Huygens probe through the atmosphere."
Sierra Club and Greenpeace will go off on the Administration of whatever President would suggest mining it for raw materials.
"Snow," in this context, refers to solid precipitation out of the "atmosphere." That can refer to water ice on the surface the earth, iron flakes at the boundary of the inner and outer core, or hydrocarbons on the surface of Titan.
Nowhere does the article claim that Titan has water snow - it says "hydrocarbon rain and snow". The "hydrocarbon" applies to both.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I was talking to a member of the orbit planning committee (yeah, these things get done in the mother of all committees) and she said, right now, the US groups are going ahead with planning as if there is no problem. It's ESA's baby and ESA's fault, so they can deal with it...
Unfortunately, the only way to "deal with it" and get data volumes greater than zero is to (a) reduce transmitted data (low bandwidth) and repeat it all over the band, and (b) do fancy moves with velocity component matching between Huygens and Cassini - completely outside the spec.
Add to this, Cassini is the size of a bus, and a fixed platform - so phoning home requires all (or most) instruments to stop looking, and the instruments look in mutually exclusive directions. Fights over orbit planning are predicted to come to blows easily this time.
But hey, we can do Faster Cheaper Better (pick two) missions now - they carry very few instruments and none are worth fighting over, see? There's progress for you.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
That was precisely my viewpoint too, until I heard out one of the profs in our department (he ran the CONTOUR mission, FWIW). His point was this: we have lots of Mars data, but even now, our best non-sexy data (e.g. the atmospheric composition) comes from the Vikings (1970s). Yes, the Mars Orbiter and the Sojourner Rover provided gorgeous pictures, and some useful science data too, but there were too many compromises built into the mission due to weight/fuel/cost constraints to do really comprehensive science.
OTOH, I agree with you that some science is better than none at all: when the billion dollar Mars Orbiter vanished, that was a lot of time and effort with nothing left to show. So the concept of F/B/C is, indeed, good. And I agree with you that the American public is way too risk intolerant (try swimming in a public place!), and the media loves failure (compare Apollo 12 coverage to Apollo 13).
But: the pendulum has swung too far. The missions now are too fast, too cheap, and better only from the pretty-picture perspective. We're building not one, but two identical Athena rovers for Mars - and you know what? The best science can't make it there, due to weight and payload volume limitations. This is not good science.
Of course, I personally do radio astronomy, and all this is corridor gossip, so feel free to add salt to taste...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/05/03/1617211.shtm l
Guess where Dell put all those recalled laptops that catch on fire...
"But: the pendulum has swung too far. The missions now are too fast, too cheap, and better only from the pretty-picture perspective."
huh? thats just plain false. don't buy into the "they don't make em like they used to" type empty arguments coming from impossible to please curmudgeons and so called critics of space science. Some obvious examples that fly in the face of your claim are the Mars Global Surveyor (part of NASAs faster better cheaper program) which has collected more information about Mars than all previous missions combined. The F.B.Cheaper Transition Region and Coronal Explorer probe (75M$!) is now finally helping to uncover the mystery of why the suns corona is so hot. Something not even SOHO has accomplished. The spectacularly successful Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)probe was the first spacecraft ever to orbit an asteroid and take close up images of its surface. It was the first to land on and take (extremely accurate) close range gamma spectroscopic measurments of an asteroids' composition. It provided invaluable scientific information on the inner morphology of the asteroid which gives insights into the structure of other old large asteroids (and potential NEO's). Mars Pathfinder, another member of the faster better cheaper brigade did not just take "pretty pictures", it gathered huge amounts of info on mineralogy and geochemical processes on the surface using the APXS instrument on the sojourner rover. It also sent back never before seen meterological measurments. Even if a mars mission only did send back images of the surface they would be scientifically valuable, not to mention the huge public interest they gather.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
And this is on topic how? Oh, I get it...Nice continents on Titan, heh-heh-heh...
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Although there might be enough resources otherwise for a mining operation. It could be relatively easy to pull oxegen from the atmosphere, etc if someone wanted to put a base there.
I figure that we'll be out there in maybe 300 - 400 years. This based on the idea that it took maybe 500 years to get the New world under total control, and so I project another time period of similar size (500 to 1000 years) to expand out across the Solar System
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
According to the article, this is the second bright feature to be found on Titan with the new optical system employed. The image accompanying the article really does seem to clearly show this apparent land mass or continent, however there is no evidence of the first bright feature. Presumeably this is on the other side of the moon. It would be interesting to note where the two apparent masses are in relation to eachother- if they are directly opposite this might lead to a different explanation of their existence than if they were apparently randomly occuring.
James Hogan wrote a really good book about "life" on Titan. It focusses a lot on the fact that Titan's atmosphere and temp. are near the tripoint of methane; much like water here on Earth. It is a good and funny read. You can find it here. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0785787631/ o/qid=990374011/sr=8-1/ref=aps_sr_b_1_1/002-130796 0-9176821
It could be snowing steadily? And there's still the change in sunlight every few weeks, as Titan revolves around Saturn...
Wait, who said it would be water? It is supposed that various hydrocarbons `rain' or `snow' to the surface, definitely not water.
"Thicker" doesn't mean "higher pressure". IIRC the pressure on Titan would be around 1.5 atm; however, since it is much colder than on Earth and the atmosphere doesn't have the same composition, its density can very well be ten times as much as ours.
That could be bigger than the 1999 double Mars probe failure, Galileo's jammed antenna, or Hubble's nearsighted mirror!
Very true. But we're looking for life anywhere we think it's likely to appear, and optimists think that it will evolve anywhere with the right conditions.
Furthermore, I recall some crazy idea mentioned in Stephen Baxter's Titan, that life could exist there, based on nitrogen, ammonia and cyanide instead of oxygen, water and carbon dioxyde... Who knows? Not us, and that's why we're trying to get a look.
I am no expert in orbit calculations, but this sounds plausible to me. As Titan is on orbit around Saturn, any asteroid that Saturn catches could be a threat. The atmosphere of Titan is very thick, so it propably shields the surface (and base) against small meteorites.
It could be relatively easy to pull oxegen from the atmosphere
The atmosphere of Titan is mainly composed of nitrogen (more than 99 per cent) and methane (CH4) so it is not easy to get oxygen from the atmosphere. However, there should be some water ice on the surface.
A bigger problem is energy - the temperature on Titan is around -170 C. Solar energy is useless. A theoretical maximum at the distance of Saturn is less than 20W per a square meter of solar panels, and the atmosphere is pretty thick. Also, there is propably not much silicon for making the Solar panels. In the outer Solar system, almost all elements heavier than oxygen are pretty rare.
The best solution I can think of is a fusion reactor using deuterium extracted from the atmosphere.
Titan is propably the best source of hydrocarbons in the Solar System, so I think we will go there some day. Some asteroids (carbon-condrite-type) contain also hydrocarbons, but I think Titan would provide a more steady supply of them.
Titan boasts an atmosphere, composed mostly of nitrogen and methane, ten times thicker than that on Earth. Scientists theorize that hydrocarbon rain and snow drizzle down to the surface.
Hydorcarbons are the primary ingredients of gasoline and other petroleum products.
No wonder research of this planet picks up during the Bush administration. He's opening it up for exploration.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
It might be snowing on that planet. This brings up two interesting points.
Firstly, where did i put my ski equipment? I think there are some pretty cool mountains in that telescope image.
Now for the serious thing. Where do the scientists come up with ideas like that? Granted, i do have a few years of Chemical Engineering under my belt, but how could it be snowing? One would think that after all this time, that the system (weather) on Titan should be more or less at a steady state condition. It is too cold on Titan to allow for liquid water so the snow couldn't melt. It can't evaporate either since, according to scientists in the article, the atmosphere is 10 times thicker than here on earth. Snow isn't going to vaporize at 10atm. The last possibility is that strong winds could be picking snow up from the surface and lifting it to the atmosphere where it can rain down once more. This contrasts with another NASA article stating that the 'fog' on Titan is not turbulent, but dead still, this was stated to shut out theories that these 'bright' spots were merely weather phenomena like seen with Jupiter's Red Spot.
Anyone want to enlighten me or comment on this further, this article has me quite intrigued.
. echo -e \\04 >
Even if they don't fix the doppler problem, the Cassini 'mothership' has a radar system on board, which they will use to 'scan' Titan every time they pass, (probably about a dozen times during the mission), and from the radar echos, they will be able to map out a fair percentage of the moon's surface. The Huygens probe will give a 'close up' of the properties of the atmosphere, and if they're lucky, a small section of the surface.
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights