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Saturn Hailstorm

Posted by CmdrTaco on 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."

6 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Old news by Roland+Piquepaille · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've been able to hear Saturn hailstorms for quite some time now...

  2. Re:Sound in Space? by dsanfte · · 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.
    --
    occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
  3. Re:Powerful Hull? by dorlthed · · 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.

  4. Re:Powerful Hull? by another_henry · · 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.

    --
    "Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
  5. About as meaningful as false-color images by Jonathan · · 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.

  6. No microphone by jgs · · 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.