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.

Oil? Oil! OIL!

[rylin]

...which is believed to support oily lakes and seas...

Americans! Invade!

Too close to capture all of Saturn

[Azahar]

Now that Cassini is so close that it can't take a photo that includes all of Saturn I think it is a good time to start paying more attention to the photos coming back.

This is one probe that promises so much that I have decided to enjoy the anticipation and appreciate the photos as they return, slowly and beautifully.

Saturn is the dream planet after all, all those rings, all that mystery. I can't say that I would like to live in orbit around it though.

Suspense

[smari]

I remember when Cassini was launched - I considered it my birthday present from NASA at the time. Now, it's not long to go... suspense is rising.

Let's hope they find something that gives the general public a run for their money; We need another space race or something to get people out of bed in the mornings.

When was the last time you saw a teenager staring at the sky in awe?

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.

Little Green Men in our neighborhood

[Just Some Guy]

I know this is pretty off-topic, but given that we've never had a good look at the surface of some of these moons, is there any reason that they couldn't be inhabited be sentient creatures at the social equivalent of medieval Europe? Put another way, if there were a somewhat advanced society on Titan 1000 years ago, but one that hadn't ventured into space yet, how would they have been able to know that there was life on Earth at that time? We weren't broadcasting radio signals at that time, and hadn't made any large-scale modifications to the planet that would be visible from space (ie giant agricultural regions, cities at night).

I'm not a LGM kook - I have no expectation at all that we'd find any sort of life there. Still, is there any particular reason why we seem to be so sure of that?

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

[tigersha]

Arthur C Clarke once wrote a nice little piece called "Apes or Angels" (Ok, the title may be wrong). Basically his point is that the universe is 10 billion years old, we have been here for 5 million years. That is a tiny drop in the lifetime of the universe. So if we hit alien species the chances that life on the planet would be exactly in the same range as our evolutionary scale is pretty remote because 1 million years back or forth yould not be much in the tiemscale that the universe operates in.

There is a much better chance that they would be either millions of years behind us (bacterial or so) or millions of years ahead. They would more probably or not be either Apes or Angels.

Btw, this is one argument to use to say why we have not found any aliens yet: No ways to find bacteria on a long range and perhaps if they are millions of years ahead they would be so strange to us that we would not now what to look for. All advanced technology looks like magic.

So the chances of finding a civilization close to here which is about 1000 year ahead or behind us is pretty much zilch purely from a statistical point of view.

Of course, the argument does not quite hold in the Solar System since all the bodies in it are about the same age per definition (they were formed at the same time). But then you could still be talking a million years give or take. No human-like organisms then.

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.