Saturn Hailstorm

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday July 11, 2004 @04:07AM from the wear-your-hard-hat dept.

crmartin writes "NASA has released a web story about the sounds recorded aboard the Cassini spacecraft as it pased through the Rings. The story includes a Quicktime file of the hailstorm-like sounds of Ring particles impacting."

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Sound in Space? by artlu · 2004-07-11 04:23 · Score: 1, Informative

Excuse my ignorance, but I thought there was no sound in space?

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1. Re:Sound in Space? by dsanfte · 2004-07-11 04:32 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  From the article:
  
  Each time a dust particle hit Cassini, the impact produced a puff of plasma--a tiny cloud of ionized gas. Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument was able to count these clouds; there were as many as 680 puffs per second. "We converted these into audible sounds that resemble hail hitting a tin roof," says Gurnett, the intrument's principal investigator.
  
  They were recording plasma, not actual sound.
  
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2. Re:Sound in Space? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-07-11 04:34 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  Your going to hear something when little bits of it are slaming into you at 40,000+ mph.
  
  Basicly the stuff hits the spaceship, the sound travels thru the solid mass of the thing to the audio receivers.
  
  You couldn't hear 2 things smashing into each other, but you can hear when things smash into you.
3. Re:Sound in Space? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-07-11 04:34 · Score: 0, Informative
  
  well, i'm no epert on this--but there is no sound in space because vibrations cant travel through anything. its a void.
  
  if there were a mic embedded in the ship, i guess it could record the bibrations going through the metal?
  
  this is just my presumption of how it could record the sounds. anyone who knows for certain is welcome to correct me.
Old news by Roland+Piquepaille · 2004-07-11 04:24 · Score: 3, Informative

I've been able to hear Saturn hailstorms for quite some time now...
Re:Powerful Hull? by dorlthed · 2004-07-11 04:35 · Score: 4, Informative

Well, there's a reason these things cost millions and millions of dollars. ;)

Another example: I remember reading once about the modems they use on these things. Now a modem itself costs very, very little, but it costs them well over $10,000 to test hundreds and hundreds of modems, then make sure that they can function properly amidst the radiation, cold, etc. of space. And of course this is pennies next to the costs related to the rest of the spacecraft.
Re:Powerful Hull? by another_henry · 2004-07-11 04:43 · Score: 3, Informative

It didn't fly -through- the rings, rather through the gaps between them (which still have some crap in, but not really a huge amount of it). Also I think that it doesn't necessarily matter too much if the dish gets a few tiny holes - it should still behave the same, electrically.

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About as meaningful as false-color images by Jonathan · 2004-07-11 04:47 · Score: 3, Informative

If you read the article, you'll find out that this isn't recorded by a microphone inside the spacecraft or anything like that, but is only a representation of impact data. That is, if someone wanted to make the impacts sound like bells, or cow moos or dog barks, those would be equally as valid representations as the "hail" sounding impacts.
Cassini on DirecTV... by TheQuestion · 2004-07-11 05:36 · Score: 2, Informative

For all you Cassini watchers who own DirecTV. They recently added NASA TV to their free lineup for total choice subscribers. I noticed it about a day after the Venus transit last month.

It has been great for keeping up with the Cassini stuff though. I had it on during the entire SOI burn. It beats the crap out of a /.ed webcast.
Re:Dust cloud width by deglr6328 · 2004-07-11 06:39 · Score: 2, Informative

thickness of the rings increases with distance from saturn from meters to >1000Km for the outer rings. It's a gap in the outer rings that cassini passed through.

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Off by one (order of magnitude) by jgs · 2004-07-11 06:53 · Score: 2, Informative

so the speed of them hitting it is somewhere in the hundreds range to the thousand range.

You don't give units, but assuming you're talking MPH you're off by an order of magnitude. TFA sez:

they plowed into the spacecraft at a relative speed of approximately 20 km/s. That's 45,000 mph!
No microphone by jgs · 2004-07-11 06:58 · Score: 5, Informative

What I don't really get is why they have friggin microphones on space traveling vehicles?

They don't. TFA to the rescue again:

Each time a dust particle hit Cassini, the impact produced a puff of plasma--a tiny cloud of ionized gas. Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument was able to count these clouds; there were as many as 680 puffs per second. "We converted these into audible sounds that resemble hail hitting a tin roof," says Gurnett, the intrument's principal investigator.

In other words, the sound is a representation of other data, slightly akin to false color images as an earlier poster pointed out.

I can understand that it's a cheap thing to just throw in there

I don't think anything with mass is cheap to add to a space probe. I don't recall what the per-kilo launch costs are for one of those things, but it's not small.
Re:Powerful Hull? by Ariane+6 · 2004-07-11 07:03 · Score: 2, Informative

RTFA. It wasn't a microphone, but rather one of the probe's charged particle detectors that picked up the plasma from the vaporizing dust as it impacted.

They converted its signal to audio.
Recording wind sound on Mars by Jugalator · 2004-07-11 07:16 · Score: 2, Informative

This isn't the first time NASA have had this idea -- they have tried to record actual sounds on Mars from wind blowing (and this wasn't supposed to be a simulation of the sound, like these effects are). However, the space craft with this equipment was unfortunately the Mars Polar Lander which crashed due to the infamous metric conversion mistake. :-(

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Re:But by Cecil · 2004-07-11 13:05 · Score: 2, Informative

Sound is a manifestation of vibration, or more specificially shockwaves through an aurally conductive medium. It is impossible, therefore, that sound would transmit through a vacuum, since there is no such medium in a vacuum. This is not a theory, by the way.

As it said in the article, the sound was generated by using data from an instrument onboard that measured the impacts of the particles. It's an artificial sound, created by NASA engineers to simulate what you might hear if you were inside the probe (and it were filled with air).

And yes, before you ask, if you were inside a spacecraft and it was filled with air, and you were struck by something from the outside, you would hear it. If the hull of the ship vibrates, that vibration sends a soundwave through the air inside the ship. Works just like a drum.

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