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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."
Because I like reading about space exploration, and the fact that NASA's webserver can't be slashdotted.
Come on.
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"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
The benefits are not always obvious, and sometimes the only benefit is more accumulated knowledge. But accumulating knowledge through exploration has, in the past, led to discovering new continents, new natural resources, new technologies that DO dramatically alter everyone's lifestyles (for good or ill) and even new religions. (Not much hope for a pantheon of weather gods once you understand the basics of meterology. Science can and does alter the way people think about the universe.)
For an excellent discussion of just how often seemingly obscure scientific discoveries can and do impact world events, I highly recommend perusing a copy of Isaac Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. It really puts the impact of science and research on human history into focus.
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.
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)