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Hubble Telescope Shows Giant View of Saturn
An anonymous reader writes "The giant planet, Saturn, offers the best Southern view of its spectacular rings only three times a century. The Hubble Space Telescope astronomers published this seasonal glimpse today, in infrared, ultraviolet and visible spectral bands. The Hubble also first penetrated the changing face of Saturn's biochemically rich moon, Titan, which will be the ambitious target of a landing mission - the Cassini-Huygens probe in 294 days (July 1, 2004). Because Titan changes both spatially and temporally based on observations of its atmosphere, speculation of what drives these variations derives from the moon's high content of methane and other organic building blocks."
Because Titan changes both spatially and temporally based on observations of its atmosphere, speculation of what drives these variations derives from the moon's high content of methane and other organic building blocks."
I'm 78% methane, myself.
22% other.
God
Mt Winston, Mt Niles, Mt Rumfoord or that cute little Tralfamadorian Salo? /me dematerializes into chrono-synclastic infundibula
Wil
wiki
Because Titan changes both spatially and temporally based on observations of its atmosphere...
Isn't it a little big to show quantum effects like that? Or maybe we just need to turn the power down a tad on whatever we're using to observe its atomosphere.
-- MarkusQ
The rings are bits of God? Whoa!
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Or perhaps they meant Titan is in temporal (time-related) flux like in some Star Trek episode?
Yes, that one. It is, in fact, in temporal flux. You are, too. Do you have a watch or a clock with a second hand? See how it moves like that? Spooky, huh?
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
...debris field?
No, it isn't debris. If you look closely, you will see Saturn's rings are made up of billions of white monoliths waiting for orders to attack the black monoliths of Jupiter. The last battle between the original fourth and fifth planets resulted in an astroid belt, but it is likely that Jupiter and Saturn will simply dissipate into a gas belt (not dissimilar to my beer gut...).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin