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NASA Sending Probe to Saturn
Plissken writes "Nasa along with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency have launched a towards Saturn in hopes of obtaining vital data to help understand the mysterious, vast region. The Cassini-Huygens mission is composed of two elements: The Cassini orbiter that will orbit Saturn and it's moons for four years, and the Huygens probe will dive into the depths of Titan and land on it's surface. If all goes well, more than 200 scientists worldwide will study the data collected."
This is supposed to be new news??? This is like 7 years old! Cassini has been mentioned on slashdot numerous times, and the fact that Cassini-Huygens is en route to Saturn is pretty common knowledge... why suddenly make a story about it now, as if NASA only just launched this beast...
Infact there was alot of Cassini news on slashdot (and other sites) when Cassini did its Jupiter flyby, alowing us to examine and study jupiter from 2 vantage points... Cassini on its flyby, and Galileo in orbit.
Anyway. This'll be fantastic news once Cassini does approach Saturn, and inserts itself into orbit!
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Um, excuse me?
This has been beaten to death already. Can we get over the stupid metric jokes? And if your going to do them, can you at least get them RIGHT?
I am quite positive that ESA would use metric, and infact, NASA uses metric too.
Why did we lose the Mars Climate Orbiter? Precisely because NASA *does* use Metric, but NASA's outsourcing to Lockheed Martin, unfortunately, doesn't. American coroporations persist on using ye olde system, while NASA infact DOES use metric.
So don't pay out NASA, they did it right. Lockheed Martin fucked this one up.
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Cassini was launched 15th Oct 1997, and will insert into orbit around Saturn 1st July 2004.
The spacecraft is in good health and is undergoing routine checkouts of the systems and is downlinking pictues of Saturn.
Not exactly front page news....
It was launched in 1997
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Yes, but Titan may also be a massivley available fuel source, already in a high orbit, a long way from Earth where future outer space missions can be launched from.
If life exists on Titan, the human race will seek to exploit it for our own goals of exploration to other worlds. Not a hugely good thing, but good none the less.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
So far, all we have seen of Titan is the Orange clouds circling the planet. The Huygens probe will dive through Titan's atmosphere and reveal what lies below the clouds.
This probe was launched a while back. The intersection with the planet is in a little over a year, but I figured this was old news.
Yes, as far as we know, Titan has 150% the atmospheric pressure at surface level as does the Earth, and those gases are not corrosive/poisonous to human life.
However, the surface temperature of Titan is 95 Kelvin. Liquid nitrogen is 75 Kelvin at 1 atmosphere pressure. Water ice melts at 273 Kelvin at one atmosphere. Water boils at 373 Kelvin at one atmosphere.
You would need some pretty DAMN warm clothes. In fact, you would need better insulation on Titan than you would on the dark side of the Moon, as Titan's atmosphere would be conducting and convecting heat away from you at a prodigious rate.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The researchers who get immediate access to the data are the ones who have already spent a decade or more of their lives working on the project. In return for their long-term commitment to the project they get the raw data first. After an agreed amount of time, which can vary from project to project but is meant to be long enough to analyse the numbers and write a paper on the subject, the data is made more widely available.
Most space missions including the Hubble Telescope work the same way. Apart from the occasional "pretty" picture used for publicity, the researchers who have planned a set of observations get the first chance to analyse and publish. Those who don't want to make the up-front commitment just have to be patient.
The Brits had a base 10 system but they gave up centuries ago. The French decide that there are 10,000,000 from the pole to the equator but can't get their figures right.
.9m and it was but some of the other bits that were sold as some x.y meter were infact even feet down to .001 while they were not close to the sold as size.
.299m). That would give the metric world a decent unit for measurement for building.
It turns out that the meter isn't a good "human" unit for most applications. All day I've been working on building a computer room in Australia. They used to use a foot as unit of measure but now use metric and have for 20+ years. The problem is none of the locals now know metric or imperial. I had a flatemate that was an architecture student at Melboure Uni. Not one of her friends who where in the same program could tell me how wide the lounge room was within 2 meters (its 16 ft as built in the finest tradtions in the 1850's). To me this is very scary considering they are all at least 3 years into an architecture degree.
The plywood flooring we bought was 3.6m by
All the bolts are in inch sizes but the drill bits are metric. Its a real mess.
I'm quite happy to deal with the metric system nearly everywhere execpt when it comes to building materials and in that case feet work much better. I know builders in the US that never need to write down measurements, the locals need a spreadsheet to keep the numbers together for small projects.
If the local police hear that a suspect is 5'10, they figure +/- 2 inches while if someone says 180 cm they figure +/- 20cm (thats 4x larger than 2 in)
Realestate in Australia is sold in "square" units (a square, not a square something but simply a square) that only one out of 20 people know about. It could be a quare meter or an acre and most people wouldn't have a clue.
Most people under 20 in Australia have never delt with non-metric (except for how tall people are an how heavy babies are) and couldn't tell you how big a foot is if they had too but they aren't much better for metric. The Kiwis are about as bad (so I'm not just picking on the Aussies, I just know more of them)
I propose that a metric foot be a nano-light second (about