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Cassini Shatters Titan Theories
Dozix007 writes "The Herald reports: Cassini pierced
the haze around Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, revealing details
that have shattered theories about its composition. It has
atmosphere and soil similar to primordial Earth and may contain the
building blocks of life. Scientists believed bright patches
on its surface seen earlier were pure water ice. But the first infrared
images
taken by Cassini revealed water ice as dark patches because it is mixed
with material that may be organic, raining on to the surface."
I suggest that you read more about the Cassini-Huygens mission. The mission objective is to study Saturn as a whole. Searching for life is not the mission's purpose.
- Cassini was launched by Americans (Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 15, 1997), not by an international team.
- Cassini won't orbit any moon of Saturn.
Yes, funny boy. It wouldn't be so bad though, the thing that causes the smell is the sulphur, not the methane.
Of course, you're still being hit by flying methane, not very pleasant, I suppose. Probably not so healthy either...
Because the un-manned exploration of space is run through JPL not directly through NASA. If you want more neat stuff like this, give the money directly to JPL rather than pouring it down the NASA rat-hole.
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Huygens won't contaminate Titan, it was sterilized.
These certainly are not the first infrared images taken by Cassini, not even the first of Titan, which were taken in mid April.
It was the earlier images, earth-based images, and the errant idea that the dark areas were ethane oceans which convinced the Cassini-huygens team to choose this landing ellipse. Now that they know different, one wonders whether they'll modify the plan.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The image linked to in the main story as "bright patches" does show the bright surface features (bright, diffuse background), but the sharply defined bright feature at the bottom of the image is a cloud. There is a 4 frame image of the cloud, as it moved across the surface over the duration of the flyby.
This 3 frame image prepared by the Cassini team, for their press conference yesterday, shows the surface definition through visual and infrared spectra, defining the areas of surface features, ices, and possible hydrocarbons.
JPL is part of NASA, it's just run by the folks from UC (yes, that's an anomaly and in this case it seems to work very well). They get their funding from the same places the rest of us do, ie the overall NASA budget which has slightly increased this year if I recall correctly.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
One again, I just like to point on a link to the Cassini Imageing Team's Homepage located here
Supposing "thousands" did donate money every year... let's be amazingly optimistic and say that 10,000 people donated $100 apiece (which is probably an order of magnitude too high).
That would raise $1,000,000 for NASA. Which is absolutely peanuts. That's enough to replace a few space shuttle tiles, or complete half of a small mission feasibility study.
NASA is a government agency. Government agencies waste a titanic amount of money in bureaucratic overhead. Donating money to a government agency is a waste of money.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
But finding life is sexy. People get all excited at the thought of actually finding extra-terrestrial life, and that enthusiasm probably translates to budget increases for NASA.
Also, it's not like that's the only stuff that NASA's got on the go... this is just the sort of stuff that gets lots of attention from the media and public.
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Flash on the Titan
05jul04
A PROBE has pierced the haze around Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, revealing details that have shattered theories about its composition.
The Cassini space probe, launched nearly seven years ago by an international team, became the first craft to orbit Saturn and its rings and moons on Wednesday.
It performed so flawlessly on its 3.5 billion kilometre trek to Saturn that scientists scrapped an orbit correction.
On its first trip past Titan on Thursday, the robot probe snapped infrared images that left scientists puzzled.
"This is the best view of the surface yet and we don't know what to make of it," scientist Elizabeth Turtle said at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Photos taken at 340,000km above Titan show a murky landscape with fuzzy linear structures, which could be mountains, rivers or faults.
They will get a better shot at Titan in October, when Cassini descends to 1200km to snap close-ups of the moon.
It has atmosphere and soil similar to primordial Earth and may contain the building blocks of life.
Scientists believed bright patches on its surface seen earlier were pure water ice.
But the first infrared images taken by Cassini revealed water ice as dark patches because it is mixed with material that may be organic, raining on to the surface.
The infrared map showed a mass of clouds the size of Victoria and Tasmania in the southern hemisphere, which may rain down liquid methane and be linked to storms or an upthrust on its surface.
Cassini also mapped inter action between the huge magnetic bubble that surrounds the Saturn system, and Titan's dynamic atmosphere.
The 80,000km-wide gas cloud follows Titan and is evidence the moon's upper atmosphere is breaking down.
Reuters
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JPL is part of NASA, it's just run by the folks from UC
Actually, JPL is run by Caltech for NASA. Funding for JPL comes from NASA.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
In other words; a total waste of time & money.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
The Earth receives 164 Watts per squared meter of light power from the Sun, and Titan's illumination is 1/90 that of earth, so it receives 1.82 Watts per squared meters. This heat power is sufficient to sustain a methane cycle which is comparable to the water cycle on Earth, with methane evaporating in the atmosphere, condensing to form clouds then dropping back to the ground in raindrops or snowflakes. I don't think anyone can say for sure whether it's enough power to sustain or develop life.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The radiation from Saturn is much stronger than from any RTG on these ships.
it's because they sterilized the probe they are sending to Titan, but the spacecraft they sent into Jupiter was NOT fully sterilized -- they couldn't guarantee there would be no contamination, so they took the safe approach.
With Huygens, they can be much more confident they will not accidentally contaminate anything.
The dark areas thought to be ethane oceans turned out to be water ice discolored by organic impurities...this does not mean there is no liquid on Titan. In fact, the article specifically refers to liquid rain, though I don't see any references to this on the nasa.gov site.
However, if you do see hail on Titan...the surface gravity is just 0.14 times that of Earth, and the atmosphere 1.6 times as thick. Unless methane ice is much more dense than water ice, hail would fall much more slowly. It would look like slow-motion, and unless the hailstones grow very slowly, the hail could get quite big. Sounds like something that would be very interesting to see...
To start with, the population of the United States of America is approximately 293 million as of July 2004. The number of individual taxpayers is significantly less, because large portions of that 293 million do not file a federal personal income tax return (because they are minors, because they have no income, or for some other reason). Your figure of 300 million potential donors is thus unrealistically high.
But, let us say for the sake of argument that your figures are correct, and that this donations campaign raised $30 million. How much would that "help"?
Well, it would fund 1% of the annual cost of the Shuttle program. Or about 0.92% of the Cassini mission. Or about 0.3% of a space elevator. As I said, peanuts.
The real issue is that the current admin (and probably other ones) will fight this. They want total control of how money is spent.
I would earnestly hope that this or any other Presidential administration would have 'total control' over how its employees were spending their budgets. Wouldn't you?
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Congress is in charge of allocating NASA's budget. The President is in charge of overseeing its expenditure. That's the difference between the legislative and the executive functions.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
An early Kurt Vonnegut book, and
possibly one of his best. Read it.
The issues he exposes are as appropriate
today as in 1959.
Does anyone else find it interesting that in the original draft of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the craft is bound for one of the moons of Saturn as opposed to Europa as was portrayed in the movie. Now after some preliminary exploring Europa we find that Europa's a dud and the easy-bake life mix is in fact on Titan.
In the book of 2001: A Space Odyssey, they do go to Saturn. The plot is more or less the same as the movie, with Arthur C. Clarke's bonus technical details, except that the monolith is located on the surface of mysterious Iapetus, which the book clearly indicated was an artificial satellite built for the purpose of housing the monolith. When Dave Bowman emerged from the other side, there was an identical moon with an identical monolith.
You might want to read it.
I, for the record, predict that past or present life exists on every massive body in the solar system that has or ever had a reasonably dense atmosphere and geological activity. I wouldn't be surprised if self-replicating molecules inhabit most comets, although I guess they freeze to death pretty quickly after leaving the inner solar system.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
Hmm, of course, Victoria and Tasmania are the two most southern states of Australia. Wikipedia tells me that Victoria is 227,416 km2 and Tasmania is 90,758 km2 so in total, 291,817km2. Texas is 696,241 km2.
..
So it's about half the size of Texas
VW Bugs, now that's for someone else to work out
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Except for the fact that Titan's atmosphere will be destroyed by the sun when it becomes a red giant. Titan doesn't have enough mass to sustain an Earth-like atmosphere at Earth-like temperatures; the only reason it has one now is becuase of the extremely low temperatures keep the kinetic engery under control.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
The probability of this happening is extremely low. The amount of extra energy required for an asteroid to achieve a delta orbit from Earth all the way out to Saturn is huge. It is much more probably, though still unlikely, [if life were to exist on Titan] that a life-bearing asteroid would travel from Titan to Earth.
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
no, I'm afraid Huygens is totaly unsterilized as well. It is clean but not sterile by any means. From ESA "The European Space Agency-built probe was not sterilized to a high standard". We are relying on the cryogenic temperatures of it's final resting place on the surface to do the sterilizing.
s _020103.html
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/lifesigns_spot
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Saturn is a huge gas giant like Jupiter. Jupiter eminates massive amounts of life-frying radiation. Even though Saturn has only about 30% the mass of Jupiter (Saturn is also the only planet that has lower density than water!), it is reported that Saturn's radiation output is even higher than that of Jupiter.