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: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.