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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'!!
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.
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.
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.
Come on.
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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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This time we will get it right and only post informative and insightful comments regarding what the pictures show and the possibility for life elsewhere than Earth . . . oops, too late.
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.
Yeah, or we could call it a dupe. Just like this story. ;-)
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
Actually, that was my post that I AC'd. It is an interesting point, don't I deserve a chance to get some karma for it this time?
On the 0th day, God created C
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
Huygens doesn't really have a landing site. It's supposed to do all its science while parachuting. If it happens to not land in a methane ocean, or whatever, and instead survives on the ground, that's a bonus. In which case its batteries would die in 1/2 hour or so.
As the orbit parameters for Cassini are still up in the air pending future TCMs (trajectory correction maneuvers), I would guess the parameters for Huygens' "launch" are still up in the air as well - and thus adjustable.
I don't have any official answers. But almost certainly Huygens' atmospheric entry point can be adjusted.
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.
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
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)