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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'!!
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.
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?
Come on.
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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.
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
I hope they don't see my weed garden.
Too bad this is only a false-color image and has no relation to the colors visible to the human eye.
There are pictures corresponding to approximately what the human eye would see - kind of boring, and similar to the pictures taken by Voyager 2. The improvement in Cassini's false-colour pictures is due to the use an infra-red camera and some carefully tuned filters, letting the spacecraft peer straight through Titan's distinctly murky atmosphere. This is the breakthrough - it's finally possible to figure out what's under that atmosphere, and at high resolution too!
The preliminary maps of Titan from Cassini's imagery are already beating the best images taken from Earth - including the astounding images taken from ground-based telescopes by the European Southern Observatory. Interestingly, features on the different maps do match up - which definitely shows that they're real feature, and not random camera artefacts.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
To see what Titan looks like we'll have to wait for Cassini to start making its closer fly-bys. I think the article said Cassini will do 45 or so fly-bys in the next 4 years and they'll get to around 600 miles away. That'll allow some very high resolution images of Titan and will be really interesting - this is still too far away to make any really revealing below-atmospheric level observations, as the atmosphere is so opaque and dense.
... 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 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.