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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."
/. par for the course again :)
dupe + fp = ninja?
they're at the bottom of the pool, they are just statues anyway. rock on fellow vonnegut reader
steal this sig
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"..
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someone (moderator!) doesn't read. this should have been modded funny or left alone. the sirens of titan is an extrememly famous book by kurt vonnegut, and they were really just statues. jesus people don't mod what you don't understand.
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.
"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."
- tour. cfm
Right, the parent said it. Cassini is orbiting Saturn, and does flybys of Titan. Cassini is on a complicated looping orbit so it can slingshot around the Saturn minisystem and visit the interesting moons.
Details can be found at:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/saturn
Titan isn't habitable, you say?
I thought Titan was one of the reasons hydrothermal vents were so interesting?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
The interest in Titan, as the article points out, is that it is thought to contain a frozen snapshot of pre-life forming compounds similar to what was around in Earth's atmosphere ~4 billion years ago.
Project Steve
No, they're saying that the cloud of particles following Titan around in its orbit is larger that Saturn and rings. Titan orbits Saturn at about 1.2 million km, and Saturn's rings (and thus presumably the cloud) are about 150 thousand km in radius. So the could isn't surrounding Saturn, it's surrounding Titan and following Titan in its orbit.
Still pretty neat, there's a giant gas cloud as big as the planet orbiting it.
The enemies of Democracy are
Those clouds of gas, as you call them, are believed to be methane, which is supposedly the primary ingredient of its atmosphere. If you could light a match on Titan, the whole moon would be engulfed in fire faster than you could say "who farted?"
Titan is believed to be one of the most inhospitable worlds in the solar system: I wouldn't go planning your vacation just yet.
But, to answer your question, from the ESA:
Diameter (atmosphere): 5550 km
Diameter (surface): 5150 km
Mass: 1/45 that of Earth
Average density: 1.881 times liquid water
Surface temperature: 94K (-180 degrees C)
Atmospheric pressure at surface: 1500 mbar (1.5 times Earth's)
Atmospheric composition: Nitrogen, methane, traces of ammonia, argon, ethane
I wouldn't worry too much about Titan bursting into flames. While there is lots of methane, there isn't very much in the way of oxygen, which you need to burn the methane. If you think about it, if the atmsophere were that explosive, a meteor would have set it off billions of years ago.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
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.
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?
Regarding hotspots, see my post to original (not this dupe) story . All active living organisms on Earth contains liquid water within the interior of their cells. At 94 K liquid water is impossible, and it's hard to imagine life occuring in a solid phase. This leaves something truly exotic: cells filled with an organic solvent such as ethane, which is not nearly as good a solvent or catalyst as water. Such an organism seems unlikely.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show