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Titan's Surface Revealed
MattKeeler writes "NASA's running a story on the recent findings of Cassini, the satellite orbiting Titan, one of Saturn's giant moons. New images reveal details of the moon's surface and a variety of materials that cover it."
I want to see pictures of the Sirens! Where are they??
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
"We're seeing a totally alien surface"
No shit, Sherlock?
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
/. par for the course again :)
dupe + fp = ninja?
man that shit is jaggy
Oh, don't worry. It happens all the time. We consider it a feature. :)
What if there was life on Titan and they shot down our probe because they thought it was attacking them with it's scanning technology.
Then they would send a probe to our moon and scan it with their weapons technology.
That would suck.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
If we find out that Titan has a twin, and they collide.. we could indeed have a real-life "Clash of the Titans!"
Well obviously nothing too outrageous was found: i.e. aliens, space ships, etc. or we wouldn't have even heard about it :).
-- [H]itman_forhire
For a millisecond, I thought I was looking at a picture of an inhabitable world. That's one misleading photo, imho... Not to mention, heavily pixilated.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
.. at all the Penguins. They sure are smart down there.
Their camcorder sucks.
At times like this, you can always whore some karma by reposting some +5s :)
That's because we all have short attention spans around here. If something is important enough, it gets brought up again and again.
By the way, did you hear about those pictures from Titan? I can't wait to see them.
The idea of Titan holding the key to our understanding of pre-life earth has always been interesting, but a little too optimistic.
I mean, isn't Europa the one that's supposed to develop life?
Because I like reading about space exploration, and the fact that NASA's webserver can't be slashdotted.
New images reveal details of the moon's surface and a variety of materials that cover it."
We already have a moon that looks like a pizza (Io), but I always enjoy my moon with extra toppings.
Come on.
[Error 407: No signature found]
Too bad this is only a false-color image and has no relation to the colors visible to the human eye. While this is probably nice too look at for scientists in order to do some research, it leaves the rest of us clueless about "What Titan really looks like"..
Homepage
I was wondering, that bit about the cloud, do they mean that the ring of sky that Titan has traced around Saturn has thus far gotten 'dense' enough that its a single 'cloud', encompassing both Saturn and the rings?
Kind of a 'ring of Titan' that has captured the planet and its lesser minions?
If so, thats pretty interesting. Might be useful to know how that works, if we're going to get any terraforming done in the next 100 years.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
no, they discovered a parallel NYC and LA,thereby proving entropy theory.
This is the city. Los Angeles, California. My name's Friday and I work here . . . (cough, cough cough!).
At least it looks like Marvin would like Titan more than expected.
LOL. That has to be the funniest sh*t I've ever read. And that closing jab at Bush? Pure genius.
Your post, my good sir, belongs on Best of Slashdot.
Behold, Philistines!
For the brainless: Parent is making a joke.
TNG? TNG?!? Say it with me "2001".
If you're going to crib a post from an earlier story at least try to get one that wasn't posted the day before.
What's a planet?
(Fan of Ralph Wiggum)
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Looks like the after part of this shot of California.
Ok, this is the last time I try to post a literary reference on slashdot. Don't you people read books?
Check this out. Good book. Read it.
And stop modding stuff down just because you don't get the reference.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Incorrect. Cassini just started orbiting SATURN. Cassini has a probe that NASA plans on launching late this fall to puncture Titan's clouds and land on the surface.
Note the circular feature, a possible impact crater, in the northern hemisphere.
That's no impact crater, they've found a Death Star!
I hope they don't see my weed garden.
... a variety of materials that cover it.
So, are there any Legos? Cause, I mean, you can build freakin' anything out of Legos. Life can't be too far behind.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
The full text of this article from The Economist follows. The original content is subscriber-only; it is reproduced here in the hope and expectation that you will find it useful.
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Coding theory
Not the usual channels
Jul 1st 2004
From The Economist print edition
[Image]
How to transmit information reliably
ON JULY 1st, a spacecraft called Cassini went into orbit around Saturn--the first probe to visit the planet since 1981. While the rockets that got it there are surely impressive, just as impressive, and much neglected, is the communications technology that will allow it to transmit its pictures millions of kilometres back to Earth with antennae that use little more power than a light-bulb.
To perform this transmission through the noisy vacuum of space, Cassini employs what are known as error-correcting codes. These contain internal tricks that allow the receiver to determine whether what has been received is accurate and, ideally, to reconstruct the correct version if it is not.
Such codes go back to 1948, the year when Claude Shannon, universally regarded as the father of coding theory, published a paper which showed the maximum theoretical rate at which information can be transmitted without error. But it is only recently that real codes have started to approach Shannon's theoretical limit. Those on Cassini, while powerful, still have some way to go, because the probe is limited to the technology available when it was built in the mid-1990s. But developments in coding theory made at the time Cassini was being assembled are now coming to fruition. As a result, as well as spacecraft, tomorrow's consumer-electronic devices, from mobile phones to high-definition televisions, will be able to receive and transmit data at something close to Shannon's limit.
Turbo coding, as the first of the new techniques to come on stream is known, was invented by Alain Glavieux and Claude Berrou, two researchers at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne in Brest, France. It is now being deployed in third-generation (3G) mobile-telephone networks, and will allow wireless access from 3G phones to be over ten times faster than from an old-fashioned dial-up line.
Turbo-charged transmission
Turbo coding takes one of the techniques deployed on Cassini--known as convolution coding--and doubles it. Convolutional codes work by adding some of the bits (the ones and zeros of binary arithmetic) from a block of data, and transmitting that sum alongside the raw data. The decoder then works backwards, to make sure the sums add up correctly. If they do not, it knows there has been a mistake and fiddles with the appropriate bits to try to correct the errors. Unfortunately, it does not always succeed.
What Dr Glavieux and Dr Berrou showed was that combining two convolutional codes would yield a dramatic improvement in performance--one that would go almost all the way to the Shannon limit. To do this, you have to shuffle the bits in each block of data at random. Each block is then broadcast twice--once unshuffled and once shuffled. One convolutional decoder works on the unshuffled data, and the other on the shuffled data. The shuffling means that an error which affects one block will not affect the other at the same place in the sequence.
If the two decoders disagree about a particular bit in the message because transmission noise has introduced errors, they consult one another by feeding their "opinions" about the error to each other, along with a measure of how confident each is about its opinion. Each decoder then uses the other's input to make a decision, and the process is repeated until they agree with each other.
This feedback loop has proved to be
Where is the ethical question? First of all, the idea that there is life on Titan is just speculation. Second, we are just taking pictures from outside the atmosphere at this point, no need to get excited just yet. Lastly, are you really saying we should base our ethics in regards to this on a science fiction television show? Think about what you are saying for a moment, not within the context of Star Trek, but within the context of real scientific possibilities that could await us.
I already have excellent karma, you insensitive clod! ;)
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
For a millisecond, I thought I was looking at a picture of an inhabitable world. That's one misleading photo, imho... Not to mention, heavily pixilated.
Planets are not the only celestial bodies that can be inhabitable. After all, a moon is simply a "planet" that orbits another planet. Having read the article, they spoke about clouds of gas on Titan, suggesting to me that there is some sort of atmosphere. The article did not mention however what the size and gravity is for that moon, does anyone here know?
Mad Hatter
From the comments in the story, it is either a negative or a not likely. Otherwise they would have mentioned something that could turn out to be liquid methane.
... no monolith?
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Actually i'm not a Star Trek fanatic but, if the principle of First Contact was implemented by Spanish, Portuguess, and those explorers that came after - Dutch, English, Italian.., those parts of the world which were abused (Africa, America, Australia..), would not have been.
In fact if my history serves me, and it doesn't always, the first exploration of an UNinhabited island was carried out by the Portuguese. THey managed to infest the island with rabbits, and to this day much of the vegetation as been eaten away by them...
We should not do anything until we have some kind of mechanism of first contact/analysis/non interference in natural development etc.
Who went and mod'ed the parent post as 'Interesting'? What's so interesting about him claiming to have been the origin of some AC post from yesterday?
...of these missions? How does this change my life? How does this improve the quality of life for people on Earth? So there is a methane cloud on Titan. SO WHAT? I'm not trying to be a bastard, or rain on anyone's parade, I really don't understand. I find it really interesting and fascinating, but I always somehow feel that this is really getting us nowhere. I want to explore as much as the next guy, but what tangible benefits are there?
Wanna see something on marsl _jpg_ctx_map/E05/E0502144.jpg
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e01_e06/ful
geologists: please debunk
We're getting the latest false color images of hydrocarbon rafts in methane seas from Saturn's largest moon, and you don't think that's "News for Nerds"? Maybe you're not really a geek - just a dork. Test: have you ever dis/reassembled any device, yielding both extra parts and a working device?
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make install -not war
You're just claiming WMD to invade and harvest all those "hydrocarbons", on Earth represented mostly as "natural gas", oil and coal. Crusader!
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make install -not war
For any of that methane to burn, it would need oxygen, notably absent from an atmosphere similar to Earth's (except for the "substituted" carbon content).
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make install -not war
The Huygens probe is:
Made by ESA (The European Space Agency);
Due for release on Christmas day IIRC;
Will enter Titan's atmosphere about 21 days later;
Will live for less than 4 hours while (hopefully) parachuting down to the surface;
Should give us "ground truth" to compare with all the Cassini remote sensing.
Vast, complex hydrocarbon rafts in a methane sea... could we have an embryonic Solaris in our system? Or not so embryonic? These dreams... where do they come from...
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make install -not war
Today when I was "watching" SMS chat on TV I missed a couple of heart beats when someone sent there a line "informing" that Cassini had found insect-level life on Titan. Surely that must be false since that is the only source I have come up with such news.
Disappointing, but the initial feeling was great. Still waiting for the Real One...
Any biologists out there care to speculate on exotic forms of life that can grow at 94 degree K? Probably no chance to use water as a catalyst ...
Any astrogeologists (if that's not an oxymoron) know what the chances are of localized hotspots on titan (e.g. is the core hot?)
That's no impact crater. It's the primary weapon.
"Near-infrared colors, some three times redder than the human eye can see"
.65 to maybe .75 micrometers. So are they are saying 2.1um or so?
What the fsck does that mean?
Some of the wavelengths are three times as long as 'Red'?
Visible 'red' light is around
I do wish these articles would just say what they mean and not try to make it seem more 'amazing' with fuzzy statements like that. It's like "WOW! THREE TIMES REDDER!" - when in fact, near IR is nothing special - most cheap camcorders can take pretty good pictures in that frequency range.
Ack!
www.sjbaker.org
Is as of now, unknown. Many great discoveries in science and technology came about because of investigations elsehwhere. The point is, we don't know what we will discover or how it will influence other investigations or discoveries. We do know that almost all scientific investigations lead to discoveries in other areas. That's what makes it worthwhile.
Visible 'red' light is around .65 to maybe .75 micrometers. So are they are saying 2.1um or so?
I do wish these articles would just say what they mean and not try to make it seem more 'amazing' with fuzzy statements like that. It's like "WOW! THREE TIMES REDDER!" - when in fact, near IR is nothing special - most cheap camcorders can take pretty good pictures in that frequency range.
Silicon photodetectors, like the silicon CCD chips in camcorders, have a cutoff at about 1.1 micron. They won't see 2.1 micron infrared.
Furthermore, John Q. Public reading that press release will have no idea what a "micron" is, but probably _will_ get the general idea from a phrase like "three times redder". If you want an accurate description of what's going on, why on earth are you reading a press blurb?
You realized that we are a natural element and that anything we do is a mechanism of natural development?
Sure, and so are our understanding and culture, being natural is not a reason to not use intelligence, I prefer the other way.
What's in a sig?
Well, here we have a wonderful probe sent by Earthlings to finally take an actual look at Titan, and it may soon resolve some of its mysterious features. I can't help thinking of the Kurt Vonnegut character, Salo (from "The Sirens Of Titan"), the million year old robot who was stranded on that world, whose journey through the Universe was to present to any race of beings he met a message he kept on a dogtag around his neck. The message consisted of a single dot, which meant in his language: "Greetings!" Here's hoping that they (the folks at JPL and the IAU or International Astronomical Union or whoever) will name a mountain range or at least a small crater or something "Salo". I'm sure some of them must know about this, and here's hoping that they will at least consider it. (In fact, they could just name a tiny crater "Greetings" and that would be appropriate enough, imho)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
My father is a blogger.
I recognise that white spot... that's a specular fucking highlight! They're using POVRay!
Man, first they faked the moon landing, and now they're faking satellite pictures... bastards!
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
...in the images which IMESHO would be fittingly named Salo.
Sadly, the atmospheric readings rule out an anthem sung in the Ganny Quaver.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...they didn't plan to drop the probe on Europa.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you do your looking with certain wavelengths, the atmosphere is no longer opaque. At that point, the density doesn't matter very much 'coz you can mathematically correct for any distortion it induces.
I want a clearer picture of the "dragon" that ESO mentioned, 'coz I bet it's structurally similar to Valles Marineris on Mars. And won't that pose a pretty puzzle for cosmologists? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Your link didn't work for me, but this one does. So what's the big deal? The Lips of Mars? (-:
How do I find a higher res MOC image of 28.38lat x 331.81long or thereabouts?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Ok, am I the only one that noticed that Mr. CmdTaco stated above that Cassini is orbiting Titan?
Of course the satellite is in fact orbiting Saturn.
It's necessary that I point out this fact because so many Americans don't even understand that the Moon orbits the earth.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Bill Bryson
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dchase/moon.gif