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Best Images Yet Of Saturn's Moon Titan
DoraLives writes "During recent commissioning observations of a new instrument designed for a completely different purpose, the European Southern Observatory managed to grab the best imagery yet of Saturn's largest moon. Although the imagery bears more than just a passing resemblance to some of the quainter maps of other planets there's no denying the superb, sub tenth arcsecond, resolution of the new images. And of course, if that's not good enough, they're sending a a little something to land on Titan next January. Should be interesting."
Hubble's not getting decommed. It'll be used until it fails, which without repairs will be 2007 by conservative estimates, or 2012 when it's replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope.
And NASA is pondering robotically repairing Hubble to save it from an early grave, without violating the self-imposed safety restrictions.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
... but this is another source of fantastic pics that have been taken of various objects in our solar system
NASA Planetary Photojournal
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NASA's Cassini orbiter is carrying ESA's Huygens probe as far as Saturn, and then releasing it to drop down through Titan's atmosphere.
Huygens should give us the "ground truth" to help interpretation of all the remote sensing.
Not long now - the code is nearly 10 years old...
Regards
(PM - Huygens on-board software)
The joint IAU/IAG/COSPAR committee who wrote this triennial report decides. Some objects have surface features that define the origin. Other objects simply have conventional longitudes defined presuming that they are tidally locked to their parent body. Until further notice Titan is one of the latter.
Did you read the article? The images were aquired by the ESO's VLA Telescope. Which is an array of smaller telescopes. Bottom line is that this is Ground Based Observing.
I can also see that you know nothing or very little about astronomy. Atmospheric aberration is a big problem in ground based observing. There is really no solution yet, but there are solutions comming up soon (Infa-Red measurement corrections). The fact that surface DETAILS of a moon of a foreign planet were observed is quite amazing. I would wager that this experiment performed in space would provide images quite a bit crisper.
I don't understand why you want to drag the HST into this, other than to discredit it without reason. As for replacement, I ask, WHY? You don't throw away something that works for something new. You can keep both. I don't see why Americans think this way. Keep the HST and let research continue in parallel with newer telescopes.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
First of all, these images are not taken by Hubble, but rather by a groundbased telescope. Secondly, Titan is small and far away, and thirdly, Titan is covered in a thick atmosphere. What we should do is not to complain that these pictures are bad, instead let us acknowledge the science and engineering that let us take pictures this good. But you're right, the next generation of spaceborn telescope is certainly something to look forward to!
Titan directly orbits Saturn, making it a moon of a planet (Saturn). The Earth directly orbits the Sun, making it a planet (with its own moon). Pluto directly orbits the Sun, making it a planet. It's companion, Charon, directly orbits it, making Charon the moon of Pluto.
Relative sizes aren't the issue -- the center of the orbit of the body is.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
For god's sake, can we all please get our acronyms correct! This is important for astronomers, since we use a lot of them.
ESA = European Space Agency (space based missions, including a share of hubble)
ESO = European Southern Observatory (i.e. Astronomers and telescopes)
VLA = the Very Large Array, a ***RADIO*** telescope run by the NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory). NRAO and VLA are run by americans. The VLA is in soccorro, new mexico.
VLT = the Very Large Telescope. 4 8m ***OPTICAL*** telescopes in chile. Using NACO, which is an adaptive-optics systems, you can partially get around atmospheric problems and take high-resolution images.
What we should do is not to complain that these pictures are bad, instead let us acknowledge the science and engineering that let us take pictures this good.
As a quick comparison, here's a picture of Titan taken by Voyager 2. Note the complete absence of visible surface features - the atmosphere was too murky for them to be seen.
It's definitely some very impressive science and engineering which has let people peer through the atmosphere and take far more useful images of a distant moon - from a distance of ~1,600 million kilometres instead of ~4.5 million kilometres. And through Earth's turbulent, hazy atmosphere too.
NO! Read my other post and get your names correct before you start going on about "knowing nothing about astronomy".
The VLA is the Very Large Array, a RADIO telescope run by the american National Radio Astronomy Observatory (or NRAO). It is certainly NOT run by ESO, which is the European Southern Observatory, the organisation that runs the 4 8m Very Large Telescope (VLT) telescopes in chile.
There is no other complete solution to avoid atmospheric turbulence (i.e. seeing and scintillation) other than going to space. A *partial* solution is to use deformable mirrors in an adaptive optics to attempt to correct the problem.
Even with multiple-conjugate adaptive optics (which use multiple laser guide stars to improve performance), you will NOT get diffraction-limited images on an 8m telescope.
Crisper images taken from space will only be better if the diffraction limit of hte telescope is better than what can be obtained by a ground-based system using AO or MCAO. Although nobody has a working MCAO system yet.
sorry, sounds a bit much like a rant, but might add some helpful info into the discussion...
Actually the Earth orbits the Sun. The Moon orbits the Earth which orbits the Sun. mmkay.
Sorry to spoil what you learned in third grade, but the earth and moon primarily orbit each other. The moon's gravitational influence upon our planet is significantly stronger than that of the sun. High tide isn't caused by the sun, is it?
(Well, actually "neap tides" are caused by the sun and moon working against each other. But the moon wins out, due to its proximity.)
Sorry to spoil what you learned (incorrectly) in third grade, but the earth primarily orbits the sun. Who in their right mind would call the moon the center of earth's planetary system? The sun's gravity is orders of magnitude larger than the moon's, and even being ~500 times farther away doesn't mitigate that sufficiently.
The thing that makes Luna more of a factor in Terra's tides than Sol is that (in lay terms) the difference in gravitational pull from one side of earth to the other is greater in the Terra-Luna system than the Terra-Sol system. This is why the moon "wins" the neap tides - earth's diameter isn't much in the solar system, but it is pretty significant in the "lunar system". (Egads, I remember reading that in "Asimov on Astronomy" about 20 years ago.)
It's also a pretty well known fact that the earth and moon don't really orbit each other. They both have convex orbits around their common primary, the sun. Asimov ran the numbers on this in his book too. Others have posted it on this story already.
Constitutionally Correct
Hey if it wasn't for US you would all be speaking German. (Although, that is a helluva lot better than French.) The main job of the US in the world seems to be constantly saving the Europeans from themselves.
God bless our boys who died at Normandy!!
You know who saved Europe from speaking German?
Russia.
Seriously. Go check out maps of the territory involved, the number of deaths on both sides, the number of troops and tanks and planes involved, etc. The Western Front was a sideshow compared to what happened in the East.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Whoops, thanks for the correction. This time I decided to do actually do the math to see where I went wrong. I used the following figures:
And I came up with the following (I am not an astrophysicist, but I play one on the internet):
So, this may be small consolation to earning a +4 Informative on a misinformed post, but what I had been thinking of was that the moon affects the earth more than the sun (false), instead of that the sun affects the moon more than the earth (true). Sorry for the mix up!