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Cassini-Huygens Reaches Orbit Around Saturn
Mick Ohrberg writes "The probe Cassini-Huygens is now officially in orbit around Saturn. Last nights' retro-burn was completed according to plan, down to the second, which in and of itself is an amazing feat, considering all data received is 1h24m old, as well as 900 million miles away. I must say, it was fairly exciting to watch the webcast, and see the signal fade behind the A-ring, and all but disappear behind the B-ring - all in (somewhat delayed) real-time. The SOI (Saturn Orbit Insertion) also saw Cassini-Huygens whisk by Saturn at around 68,000 mph at an altitude of about 12,000 miles from the cloud tops - the closest to the gas giant the probe will ever be during its planned 4-year mission, for instance the much awaited Huygens mission to Titan."
Not sure when the article was written but there are already raw and press images released as well as some others. The quality isn't as good as some may think and it really doens't show much detail into the rings at all.
Hmmm.
I can't believe that the data transfers over several billion miles in less than 2 hrs. I was wondering how long it might take, I was thinking more like a couple days.
wikipedia has a great bit of information on the history of this project including a section called "Plutonium power source and controversy".
steal this sig
Cassini-Hugens gives Saturn a Reach-Around
The NAME, I say I say the NAME, son is Christiaan Huygens. Associate of the Protestant Defender and natural philosopher.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
It had to do a lot to slow down and protect itself from the various particles and such. The rings of Saturn don't seem to be the most hospitble environment, ya know? I'm glad they pulled it off.
considering all data received is 1h24m old
And we bitch when our CounterStrike match lags 300ms?!
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
I submitted a story about this at 7 am, but it got rejected.. go figure.
Anyway, there's already some interesting photos, and more will be arriving during the day. check NASA TV for live video from mission control.
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
Won't it be closer when its orbit finally decays to 0?
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
nice image showing gravitonal waves in the ringshttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/images/0407 01rings1.jpg
SHE does throw dice.
"It feels awfully good to be in orbit around the lord of the rings," said Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's going to be a huge leap in our understanding of the Saturnian system.""This has just been an incredible ride," he said. "This wasn't NASA going into orbit around Saturn, it's the Earth going into orbit around Saturn because 17 countries made this happen. This is the way exploration should be done: by the Earth."
if only we could do more things like this
SHE does throw dice.
The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred just over two years ago, and you people are discussing a probe entering orbit around saturn? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!!!
I'm still amazed at the ability to work on delays like that. I get a little frusterated when remote controlled cars don't turn quite as fast as I expect them to. Think of all the planning involved... and be thankful that we haven't found any life on other planets/moons, cause that would really screw things up. Would the probe just smack into anything it came across? I certainly hope not. If so, I think some sort of technology that allowed some independent operation on the part of the probe might be a valuable investment for the next go-round.
Try and imagine this small piece of machine, an artificial eye, open to the wonders of our solar system, falling through the infinite depths of space, so that we can forget for a moment, all the troubles and tribulations around us, the cold steel and the raging fire and look beyond the physical confines of what makes us human and gaze in awe at this small contraption carrying a message of hope, of peace, of our thirst for knowledge in a never ending journey towards everything that is unknown.
Rapid Nirvana
it's called a f'en link - try this next time:
Pretty pictures
Casual Games/Downloads
It would be interesting to see how it looked like meanwhile it was in the ring system?
Or when it was nearby enough to see the massive amounts of rocks inside.
Or didn't it pass through the actual rings?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...but Jupiter is a more interesting planet.
Still, congrats to NASA -- anything that increases our knowledge of the universe while sending back beautiful pictures is worthwhile in my book.
Just like Huygens I'm Dutch, and thus I was taught a lot about him in school during the physics hours.
The biggest thing Huygens brought the physica is the 'Huygens source'. A simplified explanation: A Huygens source starts sending out sound (air vibration) because the source itself got vibrated by another source. So, a Huygens source doesn't 'create' sound, but simply relays it.
Of course this is really simplified and in reality it's fairly more complex.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida at 4:43 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on October 15, 1997
I think they made pretty good time! Good thing I wasn't in the ship, cuz I'd be asking "Are we there yet?" every five minutes!!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...I understand that the ESA-developed component of the mission -- the lander -- is due to touch down on Titan on Christmas day this year. Hmmm, sounds familiar. Wonder how that'll go.
:)
Will they never learn?
OK so I guess they'd've had to be quite foresighted to guess the events of Dec 25th 2003 seven years ago when they launched the thing.
These sigs are more interesting tha
They appearantly sling-shot it by using several planets.
:-\
Check the Spacecraft Trajectory
Appearantly they used nuclear power too.
It's all I could find though
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
They basically used a "slingshot" manuever to rocket this thing around the sun twice and use the sun's gravitational pull to fling Cassini toward Saturn. Very dangerous thing to do with a rocket full of plutonium. Thank god it didn't blow up like the Columbia or Challenger shuttles.
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F Scott Fitzgerald
considering all data received is 1h24m old, as well as 900 million miles away Recieving old data is easy. Receiving data that is 900 million miles away is very hard. The spacecraft is 900 million miles away. The data must be here, or we could not have received it. ;)
Could anyone buy these guys a FLAT projection screen ?
The interface for finding pictures is so difficult to use it has almost zero functionality. The interface looks intuitive, but when I do searches, I never get back what I asked for, especially when it involves dates. Those pictures are a big part of the mission for the general public, so I would think NASA would want to make it work seemlessly.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
You know its really easy to take for granted the fact that in the last 50 years we have gone from a confined world to launching interplanetary probes billions of miles away. I think we are all a little desensitized from watching too much star trek/star wars and setting our expectations way too high. It really struck me this weekend when i was sitting on the beach with my girlfriend, relaxing and said "the cassini probe is going into orbit around saturn this week." She just smiled, because shes not that geeky, but really, never have humans ever been able to say something like that in matter-of-fact conversation. Now its the norm. Hooray for us:)
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
I have little confused it , the second part, starting "This has just been..." was said by Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science.
SHE does throw dice.
Show a kid a picture of the solar system and ask them which planet is their fav. It's Saturn. My 3 year old has already staked a claim to it. Then.. he's not trying to compensate for anything. :)
I'm not too worried about plutonium flating around in space.
NASA and JPL did their job.
ESA better not screw up. This is the big one. Its the superbowl. You either put up or shut up. If you don't perform this time, better outsource space exploration to the russians or chinese.
This is a great day for science and I'm glad that we didn't give into the protesters back in 1997 (to prevent the mission) and 1999 (to stop Cassini from flying past Earth on its way back to Saturn after a gravity slingshot around Venus).
Although somebody has pointed out that they did qualify it as the closest approach during the 4-year planned mission, note that Galileo survived 6 years beyond its 2-year planned orbital mission, and sent back data even as they intentionally crashed it into Jupiter to keep if from possibly contaminating one of Jupiter's moons in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar fate is in store for Cassini-Huygens: both a significantly extended mission, followed by a controlled "disposal" when its usefulness has been wrung dry.
While the risk of the Pu RTGs breaking open if Cassini had hit the Earth on those slingshot maneuvers was non-zero, the risk to human health was non-existant. The stupid - 'toxic enough to kill every human on Earth' line was complete BS.
For one, it's know that at least 3 RTGs have burned up on reentry, one US and two USSR. We didn't all die.
Second, while Plutonium is toxic, it's not that bad - caffeine has a lower fatal dose than Plutonium.
I heard Carlos's comment on KTLA 5's morning news today. It was quite funny!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The data is also 900 million miles away sitting on the solid state storage unit of the C-H probe & orbiter
:P
So nyeh
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
named after Giovanni Domenico Cassini
False. Everyone involved in the pursuit of emergency medical-care vehicles knows that NASA illegally named it after fashion designer Oleg Cassini to infringe on his intellectual property. The rings of Saturn clearly owe him royalties.
It's not several billion - it's only 900 million miles away, plus or minus 2 AUs or so. ;)
Cassini TRAVELED several billion miles to get there - its path looks like an archimedes spiral because of the multiple slingshot maneuvers it used to gain speed. This is also why it took so long to get there.
They did not use the sun's gravitational pull; they used the gravity fields of Venus (twice), Earth, and Jupiter to overcome the sun's gravitational pull.
The "risk" of a Columbia/Challenger type accident - breaking apart from a launch vehicle failure or atmospheric stresses - had nothing to do with the slingshot trajectory, and the RTG was packaged against that contingency. The risk of the slingshot maneuver around earth leading to an accident was infinitesimal.
As the linked article discusses at greater length, the wisdom of the plan was disputed by some, but calling it "very dangerous" is getting close to tin foil hat territory.
Nothing very remarkable. It was launched on a big chemical booster with various upper stages. It then did the usual gravitational dance passing by Venus, Earth (twice) and Jupiter before getting to Saturn. It has a few small rocket engines on board, a biggish one that it just fired for 96 minutes to get into orbit around Saturn, and a bunch of tiny ones for attitude control and fine steering. From here on, though it will basically use the gravity of Saturn's various moons to "bounce" around and visit them.
It does have a nuclear electrical source on board but that is not used for propulsion.
It's full of stars...
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Lord of the Rings
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
I don't know if those are gravitational waves you are seeing (They are building big machines to observe those, if you're the first to see one you got yourself a Nobel prize). The lines running oblique trough the image are obviously the rings of Saturn. The waves you are probably referring to run exactly horizontal. I therefore suspect it is an image artifact, caused by something in the CCD or because the image was recorded line for line. This might be a raw image, which still has to go through image processing to get the 'waves' out with some previous calibration. If it were something to do with the rings themselves than i would expect it to be either parallel or perpendicular to the rings, and not exactly parallel to the frame.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Probing around Saturn is fine with me.
:)
But don't you hate it when they start probing around Uranus?
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Yes, I realize I should know this one already, but I can't seem to recall ever hearing his name actually said out loud and it aggravates me that I mentally stumble through every instance of his name in print.
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Most of our planet names come from the Latin form. Sometimes I see the Greek name used as the adjective. In this case it would be "Chronus", even more awkward.
M-W has you covered. Most astronomers I know pronounce it like "Hoi-gens" (hoi like in "a-hoy", gens with a hard g).
make it
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
of course i wanted to write density waves :) my mistake. "Look at that structure, it's so regular!" marveled imaging team leader Carolyn Porco as a picture came in showing well-defined bands of brightness and darkness. "I'm wondering if we're looking at a density wave. This looks like it might be a density wave, but I'm not quite sure."
Density waves, caused by gravitational interactions with nearby moons, are thought to be "kissing cousins" of the waves that produce the spiral structure seen in galaxies like Earth's Milky Way.
"These are regions where the rings are communicating gravitationally with the moons exterior to them," Porco explained. A few moments later: "Oh my God, look at that! ... These density waves are like books, just waiting to be read."
story
SHE does throw dice.
I'm thinking he was talking about the interesting pattern of the rings. In the top left corner, there is one dark ring, with several "echo" rings getting weaker while they get closer to Saturn in decreasing intervals.
I agree with you on the horizontal lines, but there is obviously something in there that I can't see...some type of ripple. Here is an article talking all about the gravitational ripples.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5333700/
Now if it turns out they ARE talking about the horizontal lines, I'll die of hysterical laughter when they finally figure it out.
thanks the other poster for the correction. the article is here i just mistaken the words :)
SHE does throw dice.
nice image showing gravitonal waves in the rings (link)
Not sure what you mean by gravitational waves let alone gravitonal waves, but there does seem to be some interesting structure in the outer ring in that picture. It reminds me of the famous braided ring spotted by the Pioneer 11 fly-by. I don't remember if Voyager saw this kind of thing.
The "slingshot" maneuver is a pretty common with deep space missions. The reasoning behind it is to not only speed up the spacecraft, but also conserve fuel. Conserving fuel may be more important than you think. Fuel is heavy and the more you need, the heavier your spacecraft will be. The heavier your spacecraft, the more fuel you'll need to turn since you're trying to turn a heavier object. An easy way to gain speed without using much fuel is to use the gravity of the planets. Cassini flew by Venus twice and then Earth once picking up more and more speed each time until it went by Jupiter. It picked up some final additional speed from Jupiter's gravity and now a few years later, here we are at Saturn.
It's a common misconception that the plutonium would have caused catastrophe should the rocket have exploded. Had the rocket exploded on takeoff, the total land area infected would have been quite small. Only if you were present at the launch would you need to be concerned. If the rocket had gotten into the higher atmosphere before exploding, the plutonium would have dissapated to the point that it wouldn't have much of an effect. Even if the plutonium stayed concentrated, again it would have only affected a small area as in the case of exploding seconds after launch. In short, even if the worst had happened, it'd be localized and not something which would kill all life around us. I am much much much more concerned with the health risks of breathing in smog around JPL rather than worried about JPL's RTGs.
Here's a link to Huygens' Merriam-Webster Online entry, with sample sound file. Basically it's "HI-gens".
If you can pronounce Finnish (hey, it's a long shot, but anyway...), the correct pronounciation would be like "höijens", stressing the "j".
AM I RIGHT, FOLKS?
I understand that Cassini used gravitational assists to accelerate for the journey to Saturn. Does anybody know what maximum speed is attainable through these gravity assist maneuvers within our solar system? Just how fast could we make something go by doing a long series of these things with the most massive bodies in our solar system?
The nuclear power is only for electrical power generation, not spacecraft propulsion. Cassini has two main engines and 16 thrusters for attitude control.
For our next project, let's murder a bunch of foreigners.
This image shows all three imaging problems. There appears to be a short cosmic ray streak in the lower left quadrant veering about 30 degrees downward and to the right, there may be some speckle in the black band or it may be a real signal (the white dots in the black band) and there's banding throughout the entire image that spreads from the white regions to the black and back to the white.
What is that horizontal waviness in the picture?
There is a low level source of noise in the camera's signal as it comes out of the sensor and gets converted to numbers. This noise adds and subtracts a small amount to the signal in a cycle. When the data is put into an image, one can see it as bright and dark bands in the image. The amount of noise is very small and is not noticeable in most images. Images that are of black sky or very dark can show this noise. The camera records the baseline of the signal for each line so this noise can be removed in later processing. Both cameras are affected by this noise but the Narrow Angle Camera is worse.
It's cute that the one that was excepted had bad spelling in the title.
Nice try, but you mean ACCEPTED
If you are going to make a comment like this, please - for the love of god - use the proper word.
I can't believe I didn't think to try M-W myself; I refer people there at least once every couple of days myself!! Duh...
Thanks!!
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And thank you, too! /. "makes you wait 20 seconds between replies" (nor did I realize it had been only 19 seconds since I replied to the other /.-er...grr...) Oh well. One, Mississippi...two, Mississippi...
(hmmm, I didn't realze
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Can anyone explain the seemingly horizontal waves that are running through all of the rings? They seem to be fairly uniform and direction and size. However, the orientation does not seem to be radial from the planet itself or any other object... Any conjecture out there as to what has caused this? They almost seem like an artifact in the images themselves.
Also, is anyone else a little disappointed that these are the best images we're going to get of the rings or are there going to be better pictures in the future? This is the closest the spacecraft is going to get to the rings, yet I really was hoping to see the individual components of the rings themselves. I've seen the intro to Voyager, and I wanted to see tumbling boulders...
Is Cassini the last of the billion-dollar deep-space probes? I don't see much else funded. Theres and on-again, off-again flyby to Pluto next decade. The Mercury probe Messenger was axed in the current White House budget. The next four launch-cycles to Mars are being worked on. But these are relatively inexpensive, small things in the couple hundred million range. Maybe a few more lunar and comet missions in the works too.
The previous NASA administrator Goldin promoted the faster-cheaper-smaller (and less reliable) probe model. I guess the initial Hubble troubles and the decade-long Galileo & Cassini projects spooked him out. At least Cassini will last for 4 to 10 years.
Second, while Plutonium is toxic, it's not that bad - caffeine has a lower fatal dose than Plutonium.
While I agree with the gist of your point, plutonium is fairly toxic. Death from a month comes from quantities as low as 50 mg inhaled; 80 micrograms inhaled is probably sufficient to cause cancer. Ingestion LD-50 is estimated to be 500mg or so for an average sized person.
LD50 of caffeine is 150mg/kg, give or take, or 10 grams ingested.
It's nowhere up there with neurotoxins; and it certainly couldn't wipe out all life on earth. But an (extremely) low probability event could kill a few hundred people.
Hi-genz... with a hard "g"
They're a little melty, but damn are they exquisite!
Isn't it great how you can ask a question on Slashdot and get two answers, both purporting to cite the same reference source, and yet completely contradicting each other?
It reminds me of somebody's sig that I noticed a while back: "Go not unto Slashdot for advice, for ye shall be told both 'yea' and 'nay'."
(and no, I'm not interested enough in this case to click either link, let alone do any deeper research, to find out which one is correct.)
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
But then again Uranus has some pretty lame moons... harharhar
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Here's the amusing narrative that accompanies the mp3 Huygens pronunciation.
I don't know if this has already been mentioned, but there are 616,800 hand-written signatures from 81 countries on a disc inside Cassini. I remember when I was in 7th grade and my entire class sent in our signatures to NASA. Now it's seven years later and my name is billions of miles away in space. How cool is that?
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
Actually, the RTGs are shielded even more than the typical black box in a jet. They are specifically designed to withstand a rocket blowing up or re-entry. So the only real worry is being hit in the head as it comes down. So, at most, one person may be killed by an RTG.
I can't believe that the people on that website are real. They claim that NASA use RTG's and RHU's to cover up military plutonium launches. Where do they expect these probes to get power from?
I mean, seriously, I've seen some pretty crazy theories in my time, but this one takes the cake. Why would the military use NASA to cover up it's activities, how would this even work. Wouldn't the military still have to cover up their activities regardless of what NASA does?
this what I meant to do
Its a shame each time Cassini is mentioned on Slashdot they ocassionaly forget to mention the link to the Cassini Imageging Teams Offical website. The link is here. Just so everyone knows... :-) Enjoy
Anyone ever play the CRPG game Mines of Titan. 1989 by westwood studios. A little blurb
That game kicked ass.
The best part was learning how to use computers so you could hack yourself free tickets, clean up your criminal record and stuff.
Anyone else beat it besides me?
Veramocor
...they passed through the ring plane, in the huge gap between the F and G rings.
Passing through the rings themselves would likely have been disastrous.
That's why cassini passed through the huge empty gap between the F and G rings.
In the denser rings, baseball-sized ring particles are about a meter or so apart. Most ring particles are much smaller than that though.
This is why the cassini radio transmissions were so strongly attenuated when it passed behind them -- the rings are dense enough to do that. If the ring particles really were km's apart, there would be virtually zero attenuation of the radio signal.
Had cassini passed through a ring instead of a gap, the mission would have been shortened rather dramatically.
MHO, of course:
j pg
j pg
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA06093.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA06095.
and no, I'm not interested enough in this case to click either link
If you had, you would have seen that both "Hi-guns" and "Hoi-guns" are acceptable.
cohen offered to eat the same amount of plutonium as nader would eat caffeine.
f f. html
http://www.atomicinsights.com/may95/plutonium_e
unsuprisingly, nader never took him up on his challenge.
Huh. Guess that shows me.
And yet, I still find it amusing that the two previous replies that I referred to each chose to quote a different one of the possible answers, without mentioning that there were any others. So the "ye shall be told both 'yea' and 'nay'" thing applies, even though in this case they were both right.
Oh well, I think I'll just stick wth my original system of pronouncing it like "Hi-guns" on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, and "Hoi-guns" on all other days.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
...by "software" I take it you mean crap flash animations. I mean, looking at his website, would you buy anything from this loon?
I am NaN
But isn't this thing just so freakin cool? Reminds me why I used to get so excited about space type stuff. (Before the astrophysics degree knocked it all out of me.)