A Moment Of Reckoning for Cassini

No_Weak_Heart writes "The NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens probe has caught sight of Titan and is now returning images that 'rival anything scientists have seen before - and that includes images from the Hubble telescope.' See more detailed images at the mission homepage."

Comments

Re:Too Early!!

[meringuoid]

But this is a fuzzy dot!Can't we just wait a few months untill it's there.

Then it'll be a fuzzy disc. It's Titan, proud possessor of the solar system's second smoggiest shroud. You're not going to see any detail through that lot.

Re:Too Early!!

[Anonymous Coward]

In the visible spectrum, probably not, but there may be something to see in the near IR or near UV range. Also, the Huygens probe has a camera on it, so we may get images during the decent. Plus Cassini has the capability to radar map the surface.

Re:Little Green Men in our neighborhood

[deglr6328]

Well, its surface temperature is 95 Kelvins for starters(almost 300F bleow zero or ~20C above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen) there can be no liquid water on the surface. Also I don't think it is believed to have the great geothermal energy like the moons of Jupiter do because of tidal effects, so no energy there either. Finally, the sunlight it recieves is ~100 times weaker than what we get here on earth, with the amount that can actually get through the atmosphere and down to the surface much less than even this tiny amount. Life needs energy, lots of it, and there is precious little on Titan.

Re:Little Green Men in our neighborhood

[frankie]

any particular reason why we seem to be so sure of that?

Spectrometry. We've looked at all of the local objects fairly carefully and haven't seen signs of chemicals related to organic life as we know it. For example, Earth's atmosphere is full of highly reactive oxygen (aka fire, rust, krebs cycle, etc) and should not be abundant unless something is constantly producing it.

If memory serves, the atmosphere of Titan is not so different from that of the Earth a few billion years ago, before life began. So if there's life there, either it's inconceivably unlike us or it hasn't gone much up the ladder.

Re:Little Green Men in our neighborhood

[another_henry]

Actually the opposite is true - the colder a planet is, the more atmosphere it can hold on to. This is because the thermal velocity, that is the average speed of the gas molecules, depends on the temperature and increases on hotter planets or moons. If it's above the escape velocity, bye-bye atmosphere. Incidentally this is why the Earth has no hydrogen or helium in its atmosphere, because those lighter gases need less heat to reach high thermal velocities, and they just go zipping off into space.

Some chemist correct me here, but I don't think there's any potential energy in just the hydrocarbons. You need oxygen to burn them in as well, which Titan doesn't have. I can't think of a way to extract energy from them alone.