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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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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.
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.