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Cassini's First Glimpse of Saturn
EccentricAnomaly writes "The Cassini spacecraft has snapped its first picture of Saturn from 177 million miles away. Cassini is due to arrive at Saturn in July 2004, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn (Pioneer 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 just did quick flybys of Saturn). Cassini carries the Huygens probe which will land on Saturn's moon Titan in January 2005."
Woo Hoo! Those 72 pounds of plutonium have almost reached their destination. Those thrice accursed Satunians won't know what hit them! And we also have a little surprise for those shifty little Titans too...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I know this is cool and all... but still... we have so many problems on our own earth... shouldn't we solve those first? I mean i have no prolbem with a bunch of scientists playing with taxpayer money but shouldn't the common men get seomthing out of it as well??
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
PR, but what's the use? Detailed pics of Saturn and rings, yay, but nothing we don't have. Although, the huygens probe actually looks useful, I think NASA should be more ambitious.
Isn't that enough?
Anybody know if there are any planned missions to Jupiter's moon Europa? I read somewhere that there are water there and hence potential life ('Europeans' rather than 'Martians')
...if the Cassini already flew by Earth?
I remember a few years ago (1997?) that there was a lot of talk about this, because it carried an atomic fuel cell, and it was sopossed to fly by the Earth in some years to gain speed due to the Earth's gravity. Ecologists were going wild because it would come so close to Earth. Well, if it's so close to Saturn it probably means it all went fine.
please excuse my apathy
hmmmmm
Where are all the stars on the picture, I can only see one white lil pixel.
Oh oh, stupid me, forgot, the stars are glued to the earths sky! I aught to read my bible!
But seriously, the picture looks like it's taken from my cartoon. I'm not saying it's fake, it just looks very cartoonish.
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
Yes it's true. I'm a janitor at the NASA Goddard facility in Greenbelt, MD. I was having a smoke one day at the loading dock at building 33. I was sitting down kinda hidden behind a recently arrived crate. Two scientists came out to have a smoke. They mustn't have seen me because they began heatedly discussing whether to use a beowulf cluster of linux boxes or winNT boxes to generate all the fake images they would require to pull off the "casini hoax". There were also a whole series of rumours, too numerous to recount, about this and many other NASA hoaxes at the Goddard facility.
we talked about this a couple months ago in my astronomy class, they think Titan may have a suitable atmosphere to support human life
I feel guilty every time I boot Windows
Are you one of those guys who bitches at every probe nasa sends as not ambitious enough? Look at the whole scope of what they do and say it's not ambitious.
What should they do.. stop sending any kind of probe anywhere and do what.... research on fusion rockets? Oh wait, they already do that... research antigravity? Oh.. they already do that too...
You probably won't be happy until they start hollowing out the moon and then launching it into interstellar space.
The parent asks about the portion of Cassini's trajectory which passed very close to the Earth. On August 18, 1999, the spacecraft swept past the Earth at a minimum altitude of just over 700 miles. You can read about it here:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/99/csearthflyby.h tml
Why fly so close? The JPL team arranged it so that Cassini went past the "back" side of the Earth. The earth circles around the Sun at a pretty good clip (about 30 km/sec). Cassini came towards the Earth from behind in its orbit. The gravitational force of the Earth on the spacecraft pulled it forward, speeding it up as it went by. By the same token, the spacecraft slowed the Earth down a little bit, but by an insignificant amount. This is one of the two sorts of "gravitational slingshot" manuevers the celestial mechanics can use to give spacecraft more speed without using lots of fuel.
Simple analogy: stand on a sidewalk as cars drive past at 30 mph. Just as one car is about to pass you, toss a tennis ball out in front of it. The collision will greatly increase the speed of the tennis ball in the direction of the car's motion (and only very slightly decrease the speed of the car). We can't bounce spacecraft off the Earth in the same way :-), but we can use gravity to pull spacecraft forward in a much gentler manner.
For information on the risks associated with the flyby, please read
http://a188-l009.rit.edu/richmond/answers/cassini. html
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Today the Kronos observatory managed to snap its first picture of Cassini. Cassini is a piece junkyard which Earthlings call "spacecraft". It will be their first attempt to orbit our planet, after their surreptical flybys almost an year ago. According to sources they will attempt to crash a small probe in Titan. Official sources at Titan colony consider a very remote possibility that this thing will fall on someone and call the mass media to stop the hype about this:
"The most probable is that this thing will burn up in the atmosphere. Besides there is some assurance that Earthlings will buzz around a little, make some fuss out of it and calm down for the next years, or centuries in Earth's terms. So we decided not to interfere on this things a get them a little happy for having a glimpse of our homeland... Anyway, I may assure you that we will not see tourists storming our beautiful landscape and poisoning our nature... However these guys have some sickening curiosity and if we stop them right now, we can see something similar to our Mars cousins were they frequently crash one or two probes every year. We surely don't want to see this happening every month here..."
OK, so how come we can't get a train or bus to arrive in time? It's a much shorter distance and scaled down, we should be able to get millisecond accuracy across town. Do we need rocket engineers designing buses and astronauts driving them?
Money for nothing, pix for free
Cassini carries the Huygens probe which will land on Saturn's moon Titan in January 2005.
Hope they did the math right...
:q!
Awesome. I love seeing stuff like this. One day people on earth are going to need to put "Earth" on the last line of their addresses. And we'll have a planet code for earth to dial before the rest of the phone number. Maybe then earth will become more harmonious as people feel there is more to life than their own little world, literally. One day I tells ya!
but that -178 Celsius surface temp sure puts a damper on things.
Huygens (Christiaan thereof) was the Dutch physicist/astronomer who came up with the wave theory of light. He also used a telescope to study Saturn's rings and also discovered one of Saturn's many moons. He lived in the 17th century, although I'm not exactly sure of his DOB and DOD, because I'm too lazy to look.
Giovanni Cassini was another who studied the rings of Saturn. He found a division between the rings, aptly named the Cassini Division, and also discovered several (four, I believe) new Saturnian moons.
I'm sure this will help connect Huygens, Cassini, and Saturn.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I believe the actual concern everyone had about Cassini flying by earth is not that it woud slow the planet down, but that Cassini uses Nuclear Power and an accident would, uh, suck.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I'm sure it didn't really happen like that, but this would be a funnier account of history, and that's what matters to me.
Results from conducting my experiment.
stand on a sidewalk as cars drive past at 30 mph. Just as one car is about to pass you, toss a tennis ball out in front of it. The collision will greatly increase the speed of the tennis ball in the direction of the car's motion (and only very slightly decrease the speed of the car)
07:45AM Looking for tennis balls.
07:57AM Finished wrestling dog for three tennis balls from the backyard. They appear to have been well chewed and soaked with dog slobber. Given daily high temperatures of 18 degrees (F) over the past week, these objects more closely resemble croquet balls than tennis balls...Oh well, technically I'm within the experiment's parameters. Cool.
08:15AM Observed six candidate cars outside of the house, but given icy road conditions none appear to be travelling at greater than 20mph.
08:30AM The dog and I took a walk over to the state highway about a mile away. The vehicles here are definitely meeting the minimum speed threshold outlined in the experiment parameters. I can't find a sidewalk adjacent to the highway, but the overpass above it does have a sidewalk. I'll use that one.
08:35AM Identified first candidate vehicle, a small four door passenger car. I completely mis-timed the drop from the overpass and missed the vehicle entirely. The dog is not impressed.
08:40AM Identified more appropriate candidate vehicle - a semi-truck with a large windshield. Perfect.
08:42AM Upon making contact, the ice laden tennis ball failed to greatly increase it's speed in the direction of the vehicle. It actually pierced the windshield of the truck (on the passenger side). The vehicle's speed was quite substantially decreased as the truck jacknifed on the highway. Additionally, over a dozen other vehicles experienced a similar high decrease in speed as they hit the now halted truck. I have obviously disproved a commonly accepted scientific principle!!!
11:23PM The dog and I remain in the custody of the local law enforcement authorities. I now understand how the imprisoned Galileo felt when he knew his experiments disproved prevailing accepted scientific principles.
Conclusion
I am determined to persevere in the name of scientific accuracy. Look for me on the next overpass you drive under and help support my search for the truth!!
Eventually we'll be able to send nanobots to Saturn's moon at which point the bots can reconstruct whatever we want.
Of course NASA will fail to run a virus scan before launch and we'll end up with a huge robot the size of Saturn's moon heading towards earth for its next meal.
>> know this is cool and all... but still... we have so many problems on our own earth... shouldn't we solve those first?
....How do I say this??
In my view it's good for mankind that we do stuff like this despite all our little 'tribal warfare' related problems. Maybe, just maybe as more discoveries are made out there, Mankind will embrace a sense of wonder.
If Mankind can become enlightened enough to see that there's a whole universe out there to explore and learn about, maybe fighting over rocks(land) and colored rags(flags) and who's god is better, will take a back seat to a drive to do things for everyone's good.
Like put effort into making discoveries that will cure more diseases, and educate our people further, and give us the foundation we need to jump to the next level.
Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we were all pulling together instead of threatening to nuke the shit out of each other?
We really need to wake up & see that there are bigger and better things than our puny little planet out there.
And if we don't get our act together soon mankind will probably never have the foundation/knowledge to set foot on another planet, or get a suntan from another star.
Myself, I feel really inspired when I see new pictures like this. It makes me want to work harder at what I do, and it makes me wish that we could all stop fighting and go outside and look at the sky.
Huh?
I make better pictures on my computer with celestia ;). If you want some , contact me, I bet I'm cheaper.
*ducks* *runs*
bah, what a bad pic. I can do better in 3dsmax.
They're using their grammar skills there.
A one legged robot floating in the rings.
(Resolve that obscure reference, I dare you!)
It is indeed the exposure - much too short to show stars. (These cameras do not have shutters to stop down.)
Late this year they will also start to do optical navigation - or optnav - which takes long exposures to show stars relative to the limb of the planet or a satellite. This relative spacecraft-star-planet information is a very valueable addition to the one dimensional range and Doppler (radar) information that spacecraft navigation relies upon.
Generally in opnav pictures the planet or moon is totally over-exposed, but this is how Linda Morabito discovered the volcanic eruptions on the Jovian moon IO - an enourmous fire fountain silhouted against the darkness of space - so you never know.
Because of their poor visual quality, optnav pictures are almost never released to the press.
No, an accident would NOT suck. You know why people were concerned? Because they were MORONS. It's not a flame, it's the truth. The nuclear fuel in Cassini is in a form that renders it harmless in case of an accident. If any pieces entered the atmosphere AND survived to reach the ground AND landed on dirt, not in the sea, they would have been easily found and picked up. Some people were actually speculating that a reentry event would kill everyone on the planet, which is just stupid. Sorry, no other word for it. Stupid is the one that fits the best.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Gotta watch those pictures really close, we may find the Foot. Look
for Earthworms in Love.
Sure it would have sucked... we would be out of a cool probe.
But yes, the people all up in arms about the nuclear fuel simply didn't know what they were talking about.
Cassini reminds me of a time that many slashdotters may never have experienced. (I am almost 40)
As a young person in K-12 school NASA projects implied an expectation level of what was possible and expected of engineers. Seeing the results of Apollo, Voyager, and Viking on every magazine and nightly newscast caused me and my friends to assume that every engineering meeting in the USA went something like this...
ProductGuy : Lets put two fully functional chemical analysis and weather observatories on the surface of Mars and send back the data to Earth. We don't have a map of Mars and we will not know where to land them on Mars until we get in orbit.
Engineering Team: OK, lets do it.
It was subtly drilled into our adolescent minds that American Engineering could accomplish anything. And we always noticed the US flag that was in most pictures of the spacecraft and landers.
Today I write software the exact way that Bill Gates wants me to but I am amazed at how everyday I hear from young coders is whining words like "That's hard", "I don't want to", "That will make me have to think." If I had ever responded like that when I was younger the comeback answer was always "We put a man on the moon, surely you can do (insert trivialized task here)".
Cassini reminds me of that 1970's NASA for some reason. Not the NASA that sent a small tinkertoy to Mars in 97 for a few photographs of rocks.
maybe it can support other non-carbon based life forms. that'd be really interesting.
--- check this alien conversation out, worth the read. stolen from: http://www.setileague.org/articles/meat.htm ---
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multi-beings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we can mark this sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."
What the government doesn't want you to know is that the hazardous nuclear materials in the Cassini space probe pose a serious threat to the environment! What if the launch failed and the rocket crashed back to earth, spreading radioactive plutonium out over a... uh, what's that you said? Cassini is in space already? Oh. Uhhhh.... never mind. :)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Mod this guy up...it halarious!
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Marvin spent most of his semileglessness on Squornshellous Zeta.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
It looks to be a fairly small image, which makes sense as the spacecraft is 177 million miles away from the planet. I think it would be interesting for the spacecraft to take one such picture a day, then put them all together some years later to produce a movie of the spacecraft's mission.
I'm sure it would beat the cgi movies that have been produced of similar journeys.
This is an ex-parrot!
No, an accident would NOT suck.
An accident would suck - $3.2billion down the drain - for a nice firework in the night sky
...says we're to cease and desist photographing the "bad side". Wants per-shot contract pay for autographed stills and publication rights, (was fishing for some 'bad pub' to make the trades).
Titan still in negotiation for close-up fees, (is off getting demabrasion). Other moons may band together and boycott for better 'extra' fees.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
(Ducks for cover!)
Why is it a big deal that we find some 400-year-old drawings from some Italian with a telescope?
I would suggest everyone to run filters on the picture. In particular, you should run edge detect and sharpen filter on it. Gets nice detail on it.
-- Esa Pulkkinen
The bush admin, calls slashdot terrorist retards and soon slashdot was blown to kingdomcome
I can understand that the usual redneck uses inches, miles, feet, etc. I just could not hate it more when geeks use miles for astral units. Slashdot should be promoting SI units.
Shame on you!
OK, you're right. It would suck - but differently than I was thinking.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Neither does the idiot who marked the parent as flamebait. If you call someone a moron, and they really ARE a moron, then only a moron would moderate that dwon. Right, or am I a moron?
...stars were lost most likely due to the fact that Saturn is such a bright planet - I am sure that if they adjusted the image to see the stars the image of Saturn would be saturated and just a bright blob.
There's an even more detailed explanation of this phenomenon at the Bad Astronomy web site, in the section where research astronomer and part-time hoax debunker Phil Plait explains in great detail why there are no stars in the pictures from the moon. Plait debunks the Fox TV least-common-denominator showcase "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" point by point... too bad the rubes the show was targeted to probably can't figure out that "Internit thang" anyway.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It's been awfully hard to keep the Space Race going since the Soviet Union self-destructed and we're left with a Russia so strapped for cash that they're considering launching a boy-band's lead singer (not that shooting Lance Bass into orbit is a Bad Thing... the Bad Thing is bringing him back).
But I think things are about to get a lot more interesting... while the US press has been busy watching our Dubya waffle belligerently about Iraq, the Chinese have been quietly building their own manned space program. Operating under secrecy that would have made the old Sovietskis proud, China has built a city outside Beijing and has already made three launches of human-capable spacecraft.
Being the last superpower is like being the top dog in the pack... it's a nice place to be, but you've got a big ol' target on your head. With Russia in complete disarray, the US busy picking fights with third-rate dictators, and the EU still finding itself, China is really the only major power still interested in becoming the top dog.
If the Chinese manned launch rumored for next year materializes as planned, the space race could begin again... or the US could keep its head up its butt and wait for all those grave predictions from the first space race to come true.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
We have so many problems on our own planet, yes thats right. One of them is a sexist crude Slashdot nerd named "Pussy Is Money".
A 1337
123 some street
City, ST 12345
USA
Earth, Sol System
Western Spiral Arm, Milky Way Galaxy
Universe 1
And I should say that among the members of VE2CUA (Concordia University Amateur radio), and pioneer of amateur packet radio was Norm Pearl, who's company DataRadio did the packet link between the Mars Rover and its base-station (with help from Motorola). Yeah, but I can still kick his and Bob's butt in SPAXX!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
How come I can't get Celestia to show the correct phase and ring shadow at the same time, to look the same as this photo?
And: How phreaking kewl is it that we can view recent probe photos and have FREE (as in beer) software to simulate those photos? Wow.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
It's funny that most of the press has been reporting that this is the first picture of Saturn from Cassini. It's not and a careful reading of the NASA press release does not say so. The first images Cassini took of Saturn were in July 2001. However, they were all hazy due to the camera contamination problem and so they weren't released. After a year of camera decontaminations, the current images of Saturn show that the camera is back to normal. Seee s-02/ 20020723-pr-a.cfm
s -01/ 20010720-ws-a.cfm
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-releas
A mention of the first images of Saturn can be seen in the July 20th, 2001 Cassini weekly report at
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release
Some other points... Saturn doesn't take up 30% of the field of view. The released image is cropped. Full size is 1024x1024. Counting the rings, Saturn takes up about 15%. In the first images in July 2001 Saturn was half the size.
Also, it's true what was said about the stars being too dim compared to Saturn to be visable. The human eye is a logrithmic sensor, so you can look up into the sky and see a very bright moon and stars at the same time, but a CCD is a linear device, if you adjust the exposure to not saturate Saturn, stars will be very dim and lost in the noise. You don't see anything else in the image except for Saturn and Titan because in order to make pretty pictures the background noise is set to zero in processing.