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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."
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.
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....
"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
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 Here is a home page for the mission (but rather outdated).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.
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
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.