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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."
someone tell me the data is public domain... anyone?
I knew /. liked to post old stuff, but its starting to get out of hand
Nasa along with the European Space Agency
;)
ESA Engineer: We need to calibrate the spinoff vector 3 micrometers forward.
NASA Engineer: Micrometers?
ESA Engineer: Yes, metric units.
NASA Engineer: Metric?
A bit over the top perhaps, but it's not like it hasn't happened before
.: Max Romantschuk
I suppose the submitter wanted both karma and attention whoring. Soon we'll see the following story:
New transportation system invented.
Megawhore writes: I seems that researchers have invented a revolutionary new transportation system called wheel which enables people to get around loads without carrying them....
I think this will enable us to transport our MP3 server's around.
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.
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
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
NASA launched two probes to the outer solar system in the late 1970's: Voyager and Voyager 2. Slashdot is just reporting this amazing story today...
Well it seems that CowboyNeal has just awoken from a five year coma. The Cassini-Huygens satellite is currently nearing the end of its seven-year voyage to Saturn! It was launched on way back in October 1997 and will arrive in July 2004. In December 2004 the Huygens probe will be ejected from the orbiter and will descend into Titan's cloudy atmosphere. For those that care, there is a huge archive of Cassini Jupiter data availible. Sadly, there are few (if any) Jupiter publications as it seems a few NASA engineers & scientists are still mucking around with the calibration.
"Nasa along with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency have launched a towards Saturn"
Goddamn. They're spending our letters like they grow on trees. Sure, today they're just launching 'a', but tomorrow it'll be 'x', and then 't'. I want to know when they're planning on launching'u' and 'i' in to space...
Kevin Fox
But that just raises a less tractable question, how do you guess what to look for?
It's very likely that there is life out there which is not similar to ours... but where do we look?
Examining everything is impossible... there are just too many places to look, and too many things to look for. We are unlikely to find those (non-relationship-guide-human-females) Silicon-based Venusians unless they were broadcasting in English on FM frequencies. And even then, we'd probably not notice.
Looking for things like us gives us a target to work towards.
And every little while, there is something slightly off the main track which is interesting, and we find out more about our universe. Maybe even discover silicon-based life in an environment similar to ours somewhere. That could then open our eyes to what to look for to find silicon-based life elsewhere. Then we turn to Venus and see what was staring us in the face all along.
So we are not assuming that "all life is created in our image". We are just using all the models of life we currently know of to start our search.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Japan just launched a space probe for a sample return mission from an asteroid. Here is a home page for the mission (but rather outdated). Apparently, it also uses electric propulsion.
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.
But if we found life on Titan, it would likely be in the very early stages and it wouldn't be particularly interesting. So I don't see why we're making a huge fuss over it.
Taking this logic to the extreme, we should only bother to look for not just life, but actuall civilications at least as advanced as our own.. right?
Wrong! By looking somewhere close and looking for something roughtly simular to the various forms of life we know from earth we can learn a lot. First and foremost, we'll learn that the earth isn't anything special. There is life out there, not just in our imagination, not just around distant stars, but basicly right out there in our own back yard. True, there could exist siliconbased life in the volcanoes on Venus - possible with a life-chemestry analog to the one we find in creatures here on earth that lives near black smokers - but it's a good idea to go look places where we and our probes can surive first, isn't it?
And maybe we are looking in the right place for the right thing. You never know before you actually takes a look...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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
Like dude...you can assume "there's guaranteed to be more life *somewhere* in the galaxy" all you want, nobody is gonna believe you until we actually find some (proof of) life on/in a place other than earth.
:)
:) How does either one see/know that the other is alive? How does a silicon-based lifeform perceive the world? Does it actually have senses? Do those senses overlap our own?
:)
:o
;)
Let's start by looking in the obvious places first.
It doesn't matter so much WHAT we find, as long as we find something. Then we can see whether [we|life on earth] is a fluke or not. (And we can see whether or not there are/have been paralllellls in the development of either - or whether one is the origin of the other...etc etc
And obviously, by looking in obvious (and familiar) places, we increase the probability that we will actually recognize the life-forms that we find!
e.g.
Silicon life-forms? Sure...eh..ok...how do you know it's alive? What might be a hundred years to carbon-based life-forms might be 1 second of comparative time to a silicon based-lifeform (or even the inverse of that
Let's start by finding alien bacteria and stuff like that....much easier
Oh, just a thought:
** If NASA *DO* find signs of life on another planet then I think the same thing will happen as what happened with the so-called 'martian' bacteria that supposedly arrived on earth by hopping on a comet/asteroid/rock -> We will end up with endless arguments over cross-contamination and whether or not we put those bugs there in the first place.
Space might be freakin' cold and a very convenient vacuum, but it doesn't stop pollen and bacteria and god knows what else from happily travelling along with our space-probes
(And I need someone to confirm this: Was there stuff growing on the outside of ol' MIR? or is that a myth?)
I was going to add another bit on how religious groups might get upset when the scientific community announces they've found life on other planets....but that's just asking for a troll-rating (:o (Hmm...some cults/sects would be ecstatic I'd imagine
I can think of two reasons, the first is purely for the novelty of it - Titan has an atmosphere, no other satellite does.
The second is more important. Titan appears to have a mixture of organic compounds and nitrogen in its atmosphere, which would make it very similar to the primordial atmosphere on Earth. if we can look at the chemistry of the Titan atmosphere and see what is happening to the compounds on Titan under the influence of solar radiation, we can start to work out what happened on Earth all those billions of years ago.
I don't think anyone is seriously expecting to find life on Titan, the surface temperature is so low that most chemistry has effectively ground to a halt.
And even if you aren't excited at the mission, think of the awe-inspiring pictures we're going to get of Saturn and its rings.
Best wishes,
Mike.