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Hubble Telescope Shows Giant View of Saturn

Posted by simoniker on from the please-note-no-planet-jokes dept.

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."

3 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. No Uranus jokes? by Lane.exe · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Fine then, take all my fun away!

    I can't wait to see the results of the Cassini landing. Titan's been one of my favorite moons ever since junior high science. The presence of so many different chemicals that are found in few other places in the universe means its going to be an interesting experiment. Who knows what we'll learn?

    --
    IAALS.
  2. Rings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What sort of object would have to strike a planet to produce such a spectacular debris field?

  3. Re:Clean Mission? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Don't let Echelon find this. Keep it low profile.

    The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
    In a beautiful pea-green NORAD Juliet-Class Submarine:
    They took some primacord, and plenty of Satellite imagery
    Wrapped up in a Delta Force remailer.
    The Owl looked up to the Defcon VI TACSAT above,
    And sang to a small fissionable CipherTAC-2000,
    "O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
    What an Anonymous Black-Ops Information-Warfare Pussy you are,
    What an Enemy of the State you are!"
    Pussy said to the Owl, "You rogue siliconpimp,
    How charmingly sweet your crypto-anarchy!
    Oh! let us be married; too long we have plotted World Domination:
    But what shall we do for a secure-shell wire transfer?"
    They sailed away, for a year and a day,
    To the land where the INFOSEC Propaganda-mindwar grows;
    But there in Area51 an MKULTRA psych-ops Delta Force spook stood,
    With a SEMTEX Squib at the end of his nose, Squashed by operation PaperClip